Spoilers for Challengers to follow… 🎾

: Hi Akosua! I’m so excited to be chatting with you about Challengers, which was probably the most fun I’ve had at the movies in recent memory. First of all, how many times have you seen it now, and how did those various viewings impact your experience of the film? 

: Thanks for asking me! I totally agree with you about this being the most fun I’ve had at a movie for some time. When Barbie came out, everyone was like “movies are so back!” I liked Barbie well enough but that sentiment didn’t ring true to me until I saw Challengers, honestly. 

I’ve seen Challengers four times now. I sort of had planned to do three because Zendaya had said in an interview you should watch it three times, but I wasn’t sure if I would want to. I was really nervous that it wouldn’t live up to my expectations because I was so excited about it from the moment I saw the trailer. Obviously, it exceeded my expectations. I ended up seeing it a fourth time because I 1) wanted to see it once on my own and 2) I was inspired to write about the sauna scene and wanted to revisit it first.

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I’ve talked a bit about how seeing it multiple times made me appreciate the smaller details, like background conversations and noise. Guadagnino does such great things with background conversation—just one of the ways he reminds us that all of this is happening in the world, not just some sealed off enclosure. This last time watching it, I really noticed Art’s hungry face, especially when he watches Tashi. There’s the one scene when he goes to watch her practice (before he takes her to lunch and ruins her life) and the way his eyes linger on her, the way he waves—the scene could easily fit in a stalker movie. The other scene is when he doesn’t text Patrick back to convince him to come to Tashi’s game. You see him make the choice to put away his phone and then as the camera stays on him, you can see his brain working away. I was never under the impression that Art Donaldson wasn’t a mastermind (cue Taylor Swift) but I never really saw how deep it ran!

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: I loved your analysis of the sauna scene, which you describe as “an incredibly revealing scene, one that belies the suggestion that Art is the plaything of Tashi and Patrick, the weaker link”—though as you note later on, Art’s machinations are no less calculated, despite their more subtle reveal. I’m also glad that your review mentioned that Challengers was written by Justin Kuritzkes, husband of Past Lives director Celine Song. For reader context, there’s been a lot of memes about their marriage online because both films ostensibly deal with love triangles, but…do they? In your view, would you consider either film a love triangle first and foremost? Can the word “love” even fully capture the dynamic between the three main characters, if power is so heavily laced through their desire for each other? 

: I didn’t see any of the memes but I definitely had the thought about Justin and Celine’s interest in threesomes when I first made the connection! (Honestly that one picture of them where she’s holding his arm and they’re both staring out at the camera is pure, “Hey we saw you standing over here,” so even without the movies, the jokes already wrote themselves.) 

I don’t think it’s wrong to think of either Past Lives or Challengers as movies about love triangles. Is that the primary thing they’re interested in? Not really. But I also think both writers seem compelled by the problems that an entangled threesome raises, especially when it comes to being an artist. Both movies investigate triangular desire as the beating heart of artistic passion—not just I want you, but I want to be you.

I’ve never been in romantic love so I’m willing to accept a heady combo of desire and power struggle as a form of love! For you, though, is the word “love” reductive when it comes to describing the relationships in Challengers? Is wanting to be a person in love the same as being a person in love? I’m just thinking of Tashi who, although her first love may be tennis or maybe because it’s tennis, primarily shows her love for both Patrick and Art by trying to make them good at tennis. She’s not just giving Patrick tips on his game because she doesn’t want an embarrassing boyfriend or she’s cruel! 

: That’s such a fantastic point, and something I found very relatable about Tashi’s character, which is that she is uncompromising with her own ambition, and so she expects it out of others as well. But it’s all in service of her art, which is tennis. She wants the art of tennis to improve, and she wants to be the vessel through which it happens. In a way, her passion is selfless, because for her to truly enjoy a match would require an equal opponent. But without each other, Art and Patrick have lost the oppositional spark that made them so interesting to her in the first place.

In my reading of the film, the three of them feed off each other’s insufficiencies, but also their strengths. They need each other to be at the top of their game, or at the bottom of it. It’s not necessarily that the word “love” might be reductive to describe their relationships, but I wonder if it’s sufficient. You’re right, though, in that their competitiveness is less indicative of their feelings for each other and more so their feelings for themselves. As you pointed out, both Past Lives and Challengers use triads as the medium through which they analyze each character’s individual growth and ambition–in fact, the way they push and pull each other is the basis of their love. 

The triad is also complicated, in my view, by grief. I was expecting to enjoy the visuals, the music, the frenetic cinematography. Tashi’s grief, however, was an unexpectedly poignant element for me. She’s a rising tennis star who suffers a career-ending injury after a fight with Patrick, and in one fell swoop she loses both her partner and the sport on which she’s hinged her entire sense of purpose. So of course the two losses become fused into one, and she spends the next decade resenting him as the sole driver of her misery, choosing to funnel all of her leftover rage and sorrow into shaping Art’s career instead. And what I appreciated about the film was that it didn’t indict Tashi for her anger at Patrick, irrational as it may be (sorry, the Patrick defender in me is logging on). In their adulterous dalliances with each other over the next decade, Patrick allows himself to be her punching bag because he understands that for her to accept any accountability for the loss would be unbearable. So I’m curious: what was your reading of how grief and loss impacted each relationship? 

: I am a Patrick girlie, and I don’t think Patrick is that nice! If he’s her punching bag, it’s because he likes it and it turns him on. He says in the car, “The thing you like about me is that I’m a piece of shit” or something like that, and she doesn’t correct him. 

Although the scene where Tashi breaks down sitting under that tree breaks my heart, I haven’t spent that much time thinking about her actions as driven by grief. I took her at her word, maybe too easily, when she told Art, “What was I supposed to do? Kill myself?” If I think about it, I guess the way grief has impacted, not necessarily the relationships, but all three of them individually, is that none of them have ever really grown up. It’s not necessarily that they’re stuck in time but they don’t actually deal with their emotions any differently than they did when they were eighteen. Maybe because they don’t deal with their grief in any tangible way—it’s “Compress/Repress” for a reason!—it’s hard for me to say what place grief has in their story and in their relationships. 

I know we wanted to talk about La chimera as well, which also stars my man, Josh O’Connor (talk about versatile). Grief is really interesting in that movie because for Arthur (O’Connor) and Flora (Isabella Rossellini) grief is denial, grief is waiting. Arthur seems to have come to better terms with Benaimina’s death than Flora—he’s at least accepted that it has happened. But then the end of the movie suggests that he has been searching for her the entire time and that search has led him, physically and psychically, in and out of these tombs. La chimera is a really interesting depiction of raw grief—Arthur’s sadness visibly hangs on him—that is also sublimated. 

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: This conversation was unexpectedly well-timed for me because Challengers was just released on streaming services yesterday. Watching it for the second time, I was struck again by how little “interior” life we see from each of the characters–we never learn much about their childhoods, parents, or even other relationships. That absence works well for the film however, because as you note, “none of them have ever really grown up.” You know those child prodigy types who spend their entire young adulthood conquering a sport, an instrument, an art form, etc. but when it’s time to actually hang out with people their own age they can’t keep up? That’s absolutely Tashi and the boys, and so it makes sense that they find comfort in each other, but also why they drive each other insane. 

Our mutual friend recently wrote about bodily comportment in film, especially how “it shows us the ways in which we relate to and live with one another through the fog of interpersonal opacity, dependent on each others’ reactions, reception, and mis/understanding.” Early on, the boys ask Tashi what compels her about tennis, if it’s not just to express herself or prove something. She explains that sometimes, if you’re lucky, you hit a rhythm with your opponent that feels like being in love. Maybe I’m predisposed to find a thread of grief and mourning in every storyline, but I imagine the loss that happens when she can no longer access that feeling to be one of enormous heartbreak and grief, which is why the ending shot of her face in total ecstasy had me so choked up both times. Movement is what draws them in to each other, and when she loses it, she must watch as they squander the abilities she would kill to regain (her disgust to find out Patrick still smokes, how Art takes his own recovery for granted…)

In your review of La chimera, you wrote that it’s “about trying to reverse the fate of what was thought to be irretrievably lost at the risk of going too far and getting lost yourself.” How fortuitous then that our man Josh happens to star in both films, because I think this line could describe Challengers as well. You write that his character in La chimera, Arthur, is “following some kind of compass or string that only he can see. But instead of helping him return to the world, it plunges him eternally into nothingness. Though maybe for him that nothingness is everything.” For Tashi, her greatest fear would be to end up the cheerleader in her mediocre husband’s life story, so that sense of constant searching for the ephemeral feels pertinent across both films. Neither Tashi nor Arthur are willing to compromise, which is why for either to feel satisfied, they must arrive at a kind of otherworldly nirvana (hence why both films end with their faces in varying degrees of ecstasy, which I won’t spoil). Before we wrap up, I’d love to hear any of your last thoughts regarding the two films and other linkages you might have noticed. 

: My last thought: I’m so grateful for Italian directors with a strong sense of imagination and a powerful belief in sexiness. AhMEN! 

I know I wasn’t alone this week in devouring Tavi Gevinson’s delicious 71-page zine satirizing the Rookie founder’s real-life friendship with Taylor Swift. Divided into three parts, the zine “explores the tenuous intersection between being a fan, a critic, and a friend” to the most famous woman on the planet. In the first part, Gevinson writes with the cool remove of an internet critic, referencing Woolf and Barthes as she argues that she “never cared much for “All Too Well.”” She wonders aloud whether Swift’s sheer power over her fandom has decimated any remaining shreds of authenticity, and if what exists between her and her friends can really be classified as “love.”

The zine then cuts away to a doodle-filled part two, in which Gevinson admits that part one was “my smug little “culture critic” attempt at talking about some aspects of Taylor’s music that I think get overlooked.” Having experienced fame from a young age as a prodigious writer with a massive audience, Gevinson is familiar with “a desperate need to insert myself into the Conversation,” which she does by reminding us that “I know Taylor, I knew Taylor, we were friends, maybe we are still friends, if you can be friends with someone without ever talking to them.” 

And so we spend the next 50 or so pages wondering what’s real or not in Gevinson’s imagined conversations with Taylor, although if you think you’ll get the answer, think again. Gevinson refuses to “apply a matrix of real or not real” to the piece, though the fact that we’re even asking is half the point:

“Using these biographical details as a sort of jumping-off point and not necessarily in a confessional way brought some lightness to a subject that I think about a lot — growing up with an audience or writing about difficult experiences and how that changes your relationship to your own life.”

As I write this, I’m streaming Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department, in the background for the second or third time and finding it mostly forgettable. At 34, Swift sounds like she’s working on autopilot at this point, sleepily begging her fans for an iota of permission to advance into more mature territory but afraid to take the leap on her own. It reads safe, like she’s already tired of the academia schtick before it’s even begun.

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Is it “possible to form a genuine relationship with more people than you can crowd in the mind's eye at a given time? Whose humanity you can process as real? As not a reflection of you?” Gevinson asks of the fake-Taylor. To appease a fandom without abandoning one’s soul would mean to create a purified vision of them in your mind like they’ve done to you, knowing that you’ve crafted it to your own whims to insulate yourself from harm. In other words, mutual dehumanization:

“Few people who can tell you who you were before you were also your image-double. Maybe we were no one at all, Taylor and I, before our flatter yet richer doppelgangers came into being-unreal to ourselves until our image-doubles could speak for us. But at least they did speak.”

In Swift’s new album, she bravely reminds us of the Matty Healy of it all even after Tree Paine worked so hard to make us forget. I can hear Swift’s resentment towards her fans for meddling in her business, but I also hear self-resentment in how she casts herself as that one friend who thinks it’s her and her shitty boyfriend against the world. There’s a self-awareness to that characterization too, non? Gevinson pulls some of her punches, preferring to leave instead to the imagination what might become of a young woman who becomes a global pop star in a gilded cage of her own making. A god among women.

“Is it weird that I know that?” the Gevinson-character asks of her proximity to Taylor as both as a fan and a friend. By “weird,” she means “exploitative.” Is it exploitative “to observe it? To take pictures of the pictures, in my mind? To wonder if I'll write about it? Can you out-Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift?” Here Gevinson is gesturing towards her central conflict: as a writer who trades on her own life in her art, does she gain the right to trade on others’ lives as well? Exploitation versus creation, over and over again, all circling the question of complicity. “I could not love Taylor,” Gevinson finally admits: “I was too much of a fan.” 

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“Why not be glad that a woman's inner life means this much to this many people for the first time ever?” Swift asks Gevinson in the final part of the zine, which is comprised entirely of fictionalized emails between their fictionalized selves: “Because I've monetized it like everyone else on earth?”

Here, Gevinson uses the Taylor character as a vessel for Rachel Cusk-like self-flagellation: “Mostly I am shocked. I had no idea you harbored so many judgments toward me. What I find especially heartbreaking and lonely is that we could've found each other again, could've had a real friendship. Instead, you have chosen the story,” the Swift character writes, dripping in irony. In reality, of course, they’ve both chosen the story. It’s why the (fake) versions of them sound so goddamn lonely. “Growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all,” sings Swift on her newest album, just in time for Gevinson to wonder if all that guts-spilling in her own youth was worth it:

“We are united, I'm saying, in our coldness–and our condition is spreading. So, what's a role model to do? Convince people there is some healthy way to live with the constant presence of an audience? Or pry open our brains and let them see the human cost of storytelling? How for all we gain in wealth and cultural currency, we cheapen our very existences, the only ones we've got?” 

Gevinson’s right, and she should say it! That’s why I can’t help but laugh at the constant thinkpiecing around it girls, the never-ending discourse from hell. Yes, I’m participating in it right now too, but it’s only because I’m starting to feel just like I did after I watched Shiva Baby: too old for this shit!

You see, it all started when an unsuspecting Scribner editor posted a box full of galleys of Lili Anolik’s upcoming novel, Didion & Babitz, with the caption: “Literary It Girls™ get ready.” What the editor did not realize, perhaps, was that literary it girls stay ready, as do their haters. With nearly a million views and only 3K likes, the original tweet quickly ignited a firestorm of writers simultaneously decrying the tweet and/or asking for a galley of the book. So why were people so heated?

For one, Didion and Babitz had a notoriously complicated friendship, and some took the glibness of the caption to be an intentional flattening of two very different writers. It’s understandable that anyone familiar with their storied legacies would be intrigued—yet skeptical—of the ‘literary it girl’ label being assigned to them. And dare I say it, it’s the same miscommunication Gevinson was pointing towards in her piece, too. In one corner of the internet, a group of writers may playfully portray themselves as ‘literary it girls,’ while another corner baulks at such a reduction of taste and intelligence into a commodified Self.

Opponents argue that this is due to their own internalized misogyny or jealousy, though it may also just be genuine, if misplaced, concern. Yet those ‘it girl’ writers would also be the first to highlight the enormous amount of work and pressure to market one’s work in tandem with one’s ‘persona.’ Is any side more ‘aware’ of their complicity than the other?

Besides, one read of a Babitz or Didion novel will tell you that both were highly aware of this constant layer to their work, and how their images would be perceived alongside it. In fact, I often think about this line from Babitz’s (apparently unsent) letter to Didion:

“Just think, Joan, if you were five feet eleven and wrote like you do and stuff—people’d judge you differently and your work… Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren’t physically so unthreatening?”1

Of course, the paradox of marketing one’s art through a personified self is not new. At what point do we get off the feedback loop of forever reacting to the backlash of the backlash, then commenting on the backlash to the backlash? Or, as Gevinson writes: “feel like a loser, go away, write something vulnerable and thorough that proves some people wrong about something, post it, receive praise, and ambivalently return to "the work" while waiting for the other shoe to drop.” The effort involved in keeping up is enough to make someone give up trying to be cool at all. So if you need me, I’ll be over here reclaiming a different pejorative label like “literary non-hottie” instead. Come join me!

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On My Reading List This Weekend

Do you have a fake email job? What happens to the historical record when AI images are used in documentary films? The fake conspiracy theorist who started the “birds aren’t real” campaign is looking into a second act in politics. The secretive global network of ships keeping the entire internet afloat: “If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function.” The complicated history of posture policing. One reporter’s tireless investigation into Hilary Duff’s 2007 sampling of a Winston Churchill speech. Hollywood’s existential crisis. Celebrities take to social media to say: stop bullying Jeff Bezos’ wife and “lead with kindness” instead. What will destroy art first: AI, or rent increases? How to learn to stop worrying and love letting go:

“A couple is a conspiracy, yes, but we know exactly what the crime is, and it’s not sex: the crime is monogamy itself, our selfishness and greed, that we guiltlessly guard and hoard for ourselves the greatest thing we’ve ever found. Happy couples always feel a little bad for everyone else (even, especially, other couples), and that makes them feel good. Which is sick! We relish it: their privation, our plenty. What’s more criminal than that?”

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• This Week’s Loves

• This Week’s Hates

• On My Reading List This Weekend

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This Week’s Loves

• A perfect headline about the “new HBIC” of millennial writers: “Vanity Fair writer kicked off jury in murder trial for social media post on ‘hot FBI agent’.” But don’t blame astrology! Another perfect headline, this time: “Russian honeytraps useless against French spies … their wives already know”

• Bring back summer bucket lists!

• Obviously, as a notorious hater of Fake Accounts I was very intrigued by the recent Lauren Oyler takedown in Bookforum, which other writers have already covered (especially here, and here). From the Bookforum piece: “But Oyler is contemptuous of disagreement, quickly bores of research, and rigidly attempts to control the reader’s responses. As a result, the writing is cramped, brittle. Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things—the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot—but she lacks the curiosity that would permit her to do so.” As pointed out on Twitter, Sheila Heti said as much last week in The Paris Review directly to Oyler’s face: “One thing that distressed me in your collection was the sense that someone as obviously intellectual as you are nevertheless does not carry around in her head a library of references and quotes from decades of reading and remembering what she read. It seemed clear that many of your references came from Google Books searches or internet searches. It made me feel the relative shallowness of the contemporary mind that many of us share, compared to the intellectuals of the past who had a world of references inside them. Is this something you feel, or are bothered about in any way?” To which Oyler replies, basically, I’m only 33, what do you expect?

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• This extremely trippy 1934 short film about sea horses we watched on Criterion. The entire life cycle of a sea horse, including the males floating around with each other huffing and puffing as they give birth for HOURS?? If he wanted to he would, ladies.

This Week’s Hates

• This heartbreaking story, on the only incarcerated New Yorkers in “possibly the entire state” that were allowed to watch the recent solar eclipse: “Almost everybody put the glasses on and went to the window to see if they could see it. They all wanted to see it.”

• See also: the eclipse was a 3-hour boon for gas, batteries, and hydro

• It’s “time to start typing like a grownup” and ditch the lowercase, says The Wall Street Journal, even though its founder was literally who they made Succession about but ok

• Terrifying animal news time! Beware the hyper-sexual “zombie cicadas” that are infected with sexually transmitted fungus expected to emerge this year

• TikTok, for reminding me of the existence of Anti-Wrinkle Straws (“I never raise my eyebrows, nothing”). Let’s make Binchtopia’s recent podcast episode about aging mandatory in schools until we figure out what’s going on.

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On My Reading List This Weekend

• If You Love Podcasts, Dump Spotify (Defector)

• To Polly Atkin, “Diagnosis is Like a Wedding” (Electric Lit)

• The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’ (The Guardian)

• Condé Nast Purgatory: Dozens of Staffers Marked for Layoffs Bide Time at “Central Editorial Group” (The Hollywood Reporter)

• A little too obsessed with Taylor Swift? It might be a coping mechanism (Los Angeles Times)

• Against Journaling: Dennis Tang on the Joys of Not Writing It All Down (LitHub): “Don’t be afraid of losing touch with the past. After all, you were there, living it.”

• How Capitalism Disordered Our Eating (The Nation)

• The Rejection Plot (The Paris Review)

• Breaking: Arizona to Enforce 1864 Ban (Jessica Valenti)

• How to be enough (Vox)

• Academia as Accessory (Haloscope) (PS. If you’re interested, I wrote a semi-related piece a few months ago titled “Intellectual as Influencer”)

• Why Women Online Can’t Stop Reading Fairy Porn (Rolling Stone)

• The Dumbphone Boom is Real (The New Yorker)

• Optimization Will Not Save You (Magdalene J, Taylor)

• Is Recommendation Culture Making Us Act Nutso? (Totally Recommend)

• Ufologists, Unite! (NYRB)

• Revisiting Annie Dillard on eclipses (Pioneer Works): “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it.”

• The Brooklyn literary power throuple all working and baby-raising from home (The Cut)

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A friend and I were chatting about baby names recently. I’ve been married for nearly five years, so the question of how to name a hypothetical future child has crept into my mind here and there, even though I am quick to remind myself that that sort of decision is far, far into the future for us. Still, the question crosses my mind. More specifically, the question of whose last name to use; to hyphenate, or not to hyphenate. 

When we got married in 2019, I was surprised that family members kept asking if I was planning to change my last name. It hadn’t ever occurred to me that I would; I’d kept my last name as naturally as L had kept his. I was always so attached to my names, the women they represent. My first name, for my dad’s mother and sister. My middle name, for the aunt that raised him. My last name, for his long journey here from there, a reminder of the blood connecting us both to a different place and time. 

For many years, when I thought of having children, I imagined passing down my last name too. I wanted to lace my heritage through theirs, a sentiment that became more urgent after my dad died. Even with nieces and nephews sharing the same last name as me, I felt the pressure, though I couldn’t quite understand why. So I polled my friends on Instagram, asking why they had or hadn’t changed their last names. About half said they’d hadn’t, for similar reasons to my own. The other half said they had, and their reasons varied: some wanted to shed negative associations with their own fathers, some hoped to benefit professionally from their spouse’s names, some wanted to build anew from a shared name, and some wanted to avoid racist remarks about their maiden names. I’d been surprised to see so many women I knew changing their names, but I hadn’t stopped to fully consider the complicated feelings they might have about it too. 

I told all of this to the friend I was chatting with about baby names. She was in the process of deciding whether to change her own last name after her upcoming nuptials. I mentioned that I’d kept my own, though I knew it might cause headaches down the road for naming any hypothetical future children. I knew that my own mom, who also never changed her last name, found it awkward at times to have a different last name than me. Still, I wonder whether my desire to pass on my last name is just my ego equating naming with ownership. Would I be bestowing an expectation too heavy for the hypothetical future children to bear?

My friend mentioned that she knew of a newlywed couple from two very traditional families. They would be expected to name their children after both sets of families, or neither family at all. One could not have only one. I wondered aloud which family traditions might carry into the future, and which would become outdated as our generation became parents and grandparents.

A few weeks ago in Cuba I met a man who asked me for my name. When I answered truthfully, I caught even myself off guard. I was so used to calling myself Rachel among strangers that it was a reflex at that point. He raised his eyebrow and said, “Ah yes, Raquel is a common name here.” I laughed, trying to explain that it wasn’t common where I was from. He shrugged. 

I felt disconnected from my name as a child. It felt both too feminine and too adult for me, though I also felt embarrassed when people asked what it meant and I’d have to reply “a female sheep.” I remember wishing my name was Rachelle as a child; something ‘prettier’ would be easier for people to spell, less confusing. I hated the name Raquel, and I envied my sister’s citrusy, summery name. It wasn’t until I actually visited Chile for the first time as a teenager that I understood my connection to the name. I was standing in my aunt Raquel’s house while my grandma Raquel napped in her room down the hall. Two women I’d never met, but with the same first and last names as me. I was mortified to realize I’d bled onto my aunt’s couch; I didn’t know enough Spanish to explain what I’d done. She took my hands, led me to the bathroom to clean up, and wordlessly knelt to clean the spot where I’d been sitting. When she led me back to the couch she brought me a blanket and warm drink to sip on. It was the first and last time I ever saw either of them. 

*

I often think of an essay that Elamin Abdelmahmoud wrote in 2018, where he describes giving his daughter a “clunky” name:

“I wanted you to have my last name. And I wanted it to be a burden. And blood is a burden, love. It should be. It should be heavy, a weight you carry. All of us carry that unshakeable chain. We come into this world tied to a lineage, and therefore a part of an ongoing story. All of that is in your last name: you, an Abdelmahmoud, in a place like Canada. You don’t know it yet, but every time someone asks can you spell that? you’re going to feel the sting of lineage, the gentle hand of ancestry.”

In university, I took a class on Latin American politics. The professor was brand new to the department, so no one knew what to expect when she showed up on the first day with punk rock hair and a thick Spanish accent. She told us about her background in Chile, and I marvelled at how the story of her family’s exile mirrored my dad’s. She read through the attendance sheet and paused when she got to my name, reading it out slowly and with every rolled ‘r’ perfectly in place. It was an invitation, but I couldn’t take it. 

“That’s me,” I whispered shyly, feeling, not for the first time, like I was letting someone down by replying in English. She raised an eyebrow. “My dad is Chilean, too” I mustered. 

“Ah, yes! And what’s his name?” The community in our small town was, well, small.

“Hugo,” I replied, and she burst out laughing. “Hugh-Go?” she teased. “Hugh-Go… You mean Oo-Go, no?” I turned bright red. I ran into her recently, and even though it’s been years, she still remembered that moment. “Hugh-Go!” she laughed. I turned to flustered goop all over again, and she stopped to touch my arm, suddenly serious. “I heard about his passing,” she said. She just wanted to let me know how sorry she was. From everything she’d heard, he was a very special guy. 

*

Many years ago, when L and I had only just started dating, we met up with some friends at an acreage outside of town. The night was weird, the couple kept fighting, and so we drunkenly slipped out into the night thinking we could walk to the small town where L’s dad lived to crash at his place overnight. As we walked along the highway (again, early 20’s here, and Uber wasn’t a thing yet), it started to rain. I began to panic, realizing how far we still had to go, when suddenly L stuck out his thumb and hailed a white minivan.

“What the hell are you doing!!” I shouted at him as the driver pulled over. “Are you trying to get us killed?” 

The driver rolled down the window, revealing an older woman with a short brown bob and a concerned look on her face. “You guys okay?” We must have been soaking wet, and shivering cold. 

“Hey, sorry,” L said, “We’re just on our way into town, and can’t catch a cab, any chance you’re heading that way too?” 

She sized us up. We were less than 10 minutes away from the town. She shrugged. “Sure, I can take you guys.” 

Relieved, we piled into the back of her Dodge Caravan, thanking her profusely for saving us from the sudden downpour. How could we ever repay her? She laughed, as though it was hardly necessary.

“By the way,” she said, “my name’s Raquel. What’s yours?” 

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On the Menu

• This Week’s Loves

• This Week’s Hates

• On My Reading List This Weekend

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This Week’s Loves

• Chappell Roan’s new single Good Luck, Babe!

• Oh to be a French woman guiding ducks safely across the street

• ’s Hate Read series—especially this week’s issue on media parties—which is quickly becoming The Cut of Substack (complimentary). Very funny to watch the discourse from afar in the far-off land of Canada (see also: earthquake FOMO, courtesy of )

• Pre-eminent celeb scholar dissects the latest divorce announcement, but some of us still haven’t moved on from the Club Chalamet betrayal (“wicked fabrications” indeed!)

• Our April issue over at paloma magazine, including a short story about a burning woman that took my breath away

This Week’s Hates

• Taylor Swift’s billionaire privilege as the last girlboss on earth beyond critique. On the one hand, as friends-of-the-newsletter note, we’re supposed to think it’s cool she built her wealth on only her music (rather than lifestyle brands, etc). On the other hand, we’re not supposed to think critically about her vast real estate holdings, the environmental impact of her music production empire, or the very fake-sounding carbon credits she uses to justify her exorbitant private jet usage. Hmm!

• Twitter finds out what David Foster Wallace looked like, while TikTok asks: “Can funny women also be hot?” The original video appears to be gone but you can still watch it here, if you dare. Obviously it’s redundant to just list off all the hot women who’ve ever been on SNL (aka all of them), just as it is to ask “Why does being hot even matter!” So instead I’ll just leave you with Carol Burnett on male comedians.

• Welcome to the world of uplifting Ring camera content!!!!! See also: definitely no reason to worry whatsoever.

• Those “Just Walk Out” stores from Amazon that claimed to rely on “automated” cameras to track peoples’ carts before it was revealed that they were actually just outsourcing the labour real workers in India. Meanwhile: The California city training AI to spot homeless encampments.

• A thread on Twitter about a woman whose date sent her recordings he’d taken of her using hidden camera glasses, which I can’t find now! Still, new nightmare fuel unlocked—and Ray-Ban x Meta are just getting started.

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On My Reading List This Weekend

• It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now (The Baffler): “I have the ugly feeling that an Artforum feature, institutional acquisitions, and another lap around the art world circuit would cure this sense of lack.”

• The Secret Shame of Smoking Moms (The Cut): “When I walk down the street in Park Slope smoking a cigarette, I feel almost like I’m shooting heroin.”

• What is really going on with Gen Alpha boys? (Dazed)

• There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters (LARB)

• So You Think You’ve Been Gaslit (The New Yorker)

• Humanity erased: are veneers ruining Hollywood? (A Rabbit’s Foot)

• Scientists devise a new, relatable measure of climate change: “outdoor days” (Anthropocene): “Climate change will bring more days of pleasant weather to the Global North while subtracting from the tally of nice days in the Global South.”

• Ozempic Pregnancies, Meet Abortion Bans (Jezebel)

• What If You Hadn’t Frozen Your Eggs? (The Cut)

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When we’re young, we can’t wait to grow up. We dream about where we’ll be when we’re adults. Whether it’s what we’ll study in university or what career we’ll have, when we’ll get married or to whom, or parenthood, the future when we’re children feels as if it’s overflowing with endless possibilities. “The world is your oyster,” as they say. But the future comes at us fast. 

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this fascination with nostalgia and reminiscence, particularly about my teen years. Though I am tremendously appreciative of the life I have and what I have accomplished thus far, I find myself filling up journal pages looking back on and memorializing a time in my life that felt like I was on the cusp of an immense freedom. A time that felt like the world was getting ready to open up for me. And while I could say that the general lack of responsibilities and promise of freedom are the primary reasons why I continue to reminisce, that would be too easy and would enable a surface understanding of this compulsion.

There’s a feeling of refuge in looking back that I find alluring, particularly as my life has gone through transitions over the last few years, these moments have occurred often. I think this is one of the chief reasons why I am bewitched by girlhood and the transition to womanhood. Girlhood felt like waiting with bated breath, counting down to when I would be able to finally breathe, while adulthood has at times felt an inability to take a deep breath. And it makes me think, what was I in such a rush for and why do I now look back on girlhood with so fondness and a desire to reclaim those moments and that girl I once was?

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I grew up watching and reading The Virgin Suicides, which I would say is what a lot of people instinctively think of when they think of girlhood. The Lisbon sisters are a personification of youth, teenage girls who are on the precipice of adulthood and as such, are trying to discover who they are as individuals. Yet every attempt is met with resistance by their domineering mother. While I would consider this my introduction into the depiction of girlhood, and which still remains a favorite, in recent years I have discovered and gravitated to similar representations in photography. Photographers like Francesca Woodman, Justine Kurland, Helen Salomão, and Sally Mann skillfully and faithfully capture the varied emotional and physical experience of girlhood and youth.

Images by Francesca Woodman in particular have served as a guiding post in this continuous investigation of girlhood and self. The photographer, who passed away at the age of 22, amassed in her short life 10,000 negatives and 800 prints documenting herself from the age of 14 to 21. Woodman often took these photos in locations that were abandoned and decaying. I couldn’t help but to think of the parallels between the rooms and sites she chose, and this idea of girlhood being a period in which we at times feel abandoned and which feels like who we once knew ourselves to be is crumbling around us. 

When I first came across the work of Woodman, I instantly made a connection between her work and The Virgin Suicides. There was a familiar feeling of loneliness present in both that spoke to how the experience of girlhood often makes us feel as if we’re an island – alone and unreachable. Images like Untitled, Rome, Italy (1977-1978) and Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island (1975-1978) in particular through their haze capture both the speed at which girlhood passes, yet forever feels like we’re caught in its current. 

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In most of her photos, Woodman is not only the photographer, but the model, and just as my journals are an archive of the thoughts, experiences, and interactions that constructed my girlhood, I found her work to be similar in its attempt to document her existence. I find that sometimes when speaking of or actively going through girlhood, it feels like we’re losing parts of ourselves, discarding pieces in random places, sometimes with the hope of revisiting our former selves. Through her work, the photographer has left behind fragments of herself, a trail that she could have followed to find her way back. 

Woodman’s work has been described as haunting, which I would say is an apt description, but perhaps for different reasons. Photos like Untitled, New York (1979) and Untitled, Boulder, Colorado (1972-1975) feel haunted, if only because they feature traces of the photographer. A figure can be made out, but only abstractly, foregrounding the idea that who we once were, that is the parts of ourselves we are shedding as we progress through girlhood are forever walking with us, haunting us. We are unable to rid ourselves of them because they continue to be a part of us, a reminder of who we were, but also of who we can be. 

This idea of haunting and leaving behind traces of existence reminds me of artist Sophie Calle’s 1981 series of images she took while working as a chambermaid at the Hotel C in Venice. In having access to the rooms of guests, she was able to capture various items left as they were throughout their rooms. Though they were fairly common objects like shoes, suitcases, clothing, and medication, each one was linked to the person to whom it belonged, housing a story. And while seemingly unrelated to the concept of girlhood, there’s an element of voyeurism that is familiar. Through her images, Calle, like Woodman, opened a door unto moments and scenes that typically aren’t shared. What is seen when we think no one is looking? 

I remember having a visceral reaction to Woodman’s photos the first time I saw them. They felt familiar, as if I was looking at myself. There was a level of discomfort, perhaps because I saw in them my repeated attempts to reconnect with myself. I identified the arduous task we undertake during girlhood of trying to find ourselves. To evolve into a version of ourselves that is deemed fit to participate in adulthood. Maybe I find myself drawn to Woodman’s work because it balances between girlhood and womanhood. Or it could be that like her, I am still tightly holding on to girlhood through my musings. The messiness, the uncertainty, the expansiveness of it. Or maybe, Woodman and I, through our ruminations, are actively grieving the person we once were.

Karla Méndez is an arts and culture writer obsessed with analyzing art through a historical lens. She has written for the Boston Art Review, Black Women Radicals’ Voices in Movement, Elephant Magazine, Teen Vogue, Polyester Zine, and elsewhere.

On My Reading List This Weekend

• The bell of the discourse ball this week was “The Case for Marrying an Older Man,” from The Cut. A doozy indeed, the piece highlights the writer’s own anxious relationship to her own youth and the transactional dynamics she’s observed in her own relationship as a result, only to generalize those dynamics as existing in all relationships too. She writes:

  “My husband isn’t my partner. He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did. Adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. But his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on.”

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  Hmm. Congrats on the inevitable book deal, I guess! As the product of an age-gap relationship myself I have very little to contribute other than I think the writer’s appraisal of her marriage as transactional is telling, especially when she reverts to suggesting that men aren’t also supposed to benefit from romantic partnership. And speaking of NYmag’s absolute chokehold on the gender war discourse beat…

• Andrew Huberman’s mechanisms of control (Intelligencer)

• Merve Emre on Anatomy of a Fall (!) (NYRB): “More than a wife or mother, she identifies as a person who manipulates the conditions of reality with her words.”

• The age of cultural stagnation (The New Republic)

• Now that KateGate has finally quieted down, kind of need the bored Swifties to shift their focus to Boeing instead — especially because I fly home on one this weekend — thanks! (Prospect)

• What happens to the stay-at-home girlfriend after a breakup? (Cosmopolitan)

• Endo Days: are celebrity surgeons boosting awareness or their own brand? (The Baffler)

• A gorgeous meditation on death and the Chicago Manual of Style (The Offing)

• On what gets left behind when assembling stories from the lives of others (Defector): “Creating a narrative from real life requires some element of misdirection.”

• Life in a luxury hotel for new moms and babies (The New Yorker)

• The Sphere (The Paris Review): “Perhaps it felt hard to believe that anything it might project or hold would live up to its own ambition, that the dream of galvanizing mass culture is dead.”

• More Merve, this time in convo with Moira Donegan (NYRB)

• A descendant’s call for whale legal personhood (Atmos)

• Terry Nguyen on the beauty of a hometown mall (Are.na)

• Paintings of women reading in suspicious abundance (Arboretum of Notes)

• How Jesse Plemmons came to star in, well, pretty much everything (Texas Monthly)

• The emperor’s wearing Brandy Melville (Delude)

And lastly, a thread about older artists painting their wives that made me smile.

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The Sunday (Guest) Letter

Every day for like a week now my (soon-to-be) father-in-law has sent me links to articles—from The Seattle Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The A.V. Club, The Detroit News—all glowing reviews of the black-and-white, mostly silent, slapstick epic Hundreds of Beavers (2022, dir. Mike Chelsik). And let me tell you, what a relief. The week before, Johny’s poor dad had driven an hour up from Cupertino to San Francisco’s breezy Outer Richmond district, where I’d dragged him through the lobby of the two-screen Balboa Theater, past the long line of people buzzing to see Dune 2, into the other theater with the art freaks like me, and he’d cringed at the ridiculousness the whole time. But now it’s being praised in the Times and I feel vindicated. Ha!

To be fair, considering Beavers already swept in the 2022 and 2023 indie festival circuits, I’m not totally surprised it’s getting mainstream acclaim now. The sheer creativity, the technical mastery over greenscreen gags and Looney Toons-style animation, the unironic commitment to the bit—it could never have gone completely unnoticed.

The low-budget farce, made by two 30-something Wisconsin dudes (Chelsik and Ryland Brickland Cole Tews), follows the adventures of Jean Kayak (Tews), who, after destroying his applejack distillery in an episode of drunken buffoonery, must prevail against cold, hunger, and many man-sized, mascot-costumed animals to survive. At first totally helpless, Jean Kayak learns to fashion tools, draw maps, trap animals, outsmart the industrious beaver society, and eventually win the hand of the local pelt merchant’s daughter.

Remember the game Little Alchemy, where you start with the four basic elements and combine them until you get unicorns and spaceships? It’s a lot like that. Actually, all throughout Beavers there are video game elements: A little Jean Kayak avatar moves around a mini-map, his pelts are tracked in an inventory, he levels up with better tools, he completes side quests on his way to fight the main boss (the beavs) and save the princess.

It’s all very satisfying. Anyone who has seen a baby delight in turning a light switch on and off or is familiar with why corporations gamify their products knows that collecting rewards directly related to one’s strategic and tactical efforts—in other words, getting a treat for having figured something out—scratches a deep, reptilian itch. I recently heard from the San Francisco high school teachers’ scene that there are two types of local teenagers these days: The Grovers, the social butterflies who drink and smoke weed in a city park called Stern Grove, and the Gamers, the kids who stay inside and game. The distinction can seem hierarchal—here are the cool kids, here are the outcasts—but if that’s your final reading of the situation, I assume you haven’t played many video games. Like social scenes, games are puzzles, where if you can learn the rules, you can level up. But unlike social scenes, game worlds are stable, predictable, a relief from real-world chaos. Who, really, wouldn’t want to play life in an orderly and conquerable world?

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“All games are wargames,” Johny said to me about a week earlier as we strolled through Golden Gate Park, discussing Peacock’s The Traitors. If you haven’t seen it, I’m going to spoil some of it for you: It’s basically a bunch of reality stars playing Mafia, hosted by the legend Alan Cumming, and it’s such a romp. The cast is (C-list) stacked: Among others, there’s a charming but arrogant former Bachelor, a handful of Survivor and The Challenge winners (though, with that stupid name, I’m still not convinced The Challenge is a real show), a 61-year-old former Speaker of the U.K. House of Commons who has an alleged history of bullying his staff, a cabal of Real Housewives, and a friendly queen from Drag Race, who ends up as the first sacrificial lamb in a way that obviously has a lot to do with latent transphobia.

Johny had caught a couple episodes with me about two-thirds of the way through the season, when most of the professional “gamers” (the people from Survivor and The Challenge) had voted each other out and the tactical prowess of the remaining cast was waning. The Housewives generally made moves based on loyalty, and while we agreed that made for more boring TV, leveraging social capital was an effective strategy all the same. Ultimately, though, two Challenge alumni win, and I have to assume their fluency in game tactics is what clinched it. No one ever quite says the quiet part out loud—that this is a political game (there’s a reason the only non-reality star is a former politician) where some strategies are simply better than others—but the audience certainly sees it. At one point, a handful of players are gathered around a pool table, watching a former Survivor winner break down a path to victory using the pool balls as visual cues. The Housewives are only ever talking about vibes and their 20-year-long friendships, and they forget that politics is mostly a numbers game, that game theory is a whole field of study.

Wargames are a distinct type of game, played tabletop and on the computer, recreationally and by actual militaries. But boiled all the way down, it’s simply I do this, so you do this, so I can move here, set you up to do this, and so on and so forth until I win. After Johny said it, I started to see the concept everywhere. It’s Tom & Jerry, Game of Thrones, American football. It’s chess, which I never cared to properly learn until I knew I was going to write this article. Sunk into a green velvet couch in the back of an Irish dive bar, I hunched over Johny’s fold-up chess board and slowly realized how much an intelligence of spatial positioning factors into the game. One must notice presences and absences, clear and blocked paths, shapes and formations. Just like the pool balls in The Traitors, assessing the situation cartographically turned educated guesses into common sense. During one game, Johny’s army had advanced in a V shape toward me and now held control of the center of the board. My pieces, on the other hand, were cowering in the corners. Obviously, I’d lose.

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So much of Sun Tsu’s The Art of War has to do with physical tactics, with terrain. In the first chapter, one learns that “the art of war is governed by five constant factors”: 1) The Moral Law, 2) Heaven, 3) Earth, 4) The Commander, and 5) Method and discipline. Two of those, Heaven (“night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons”) and Earth (“distances, great and small; danger and security; open ground and narrow passages; the chances of life and death”), are grounded entirely in the landscape. One learns to occupy the high ground, face the sun, etc. But even the rules involving social and emotional situations are expressed so plainly that I found myself wondering if, now that I knew the rules, resolving any mundane conflict in my favor might be simple.

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But reading The Art of War is like uncovering some secret of the universe in a dream, and waking to find you remember nothing; it all makes perfect sense in imaginary battles, but to close the book and try to apply such axioms to one’s own life—to being charismatic, to figuring out your career, to buying property—feels totally strange. I suppose it’s the idea of “the enemy” where things fall apart: The opposition between two actors creates the basic structure of everything in The Art of War, and in The Traitors for that matter. Even when the enemy is more abstract, like it is in Hundreds of Beavers (man versus cold, man versus hunger, man versus beavers), wargame strategy still seems to apply. But what about man versus beauty standards? Man versus screen addiction? Man versus late-stage capitalism? How does one find the high ground, face toward the sun?

For all my love of games—of Zelda, Chronotrigger, The Last of Us, Settlers of Catan, Avalon, Tetris; none of which are true wargames but all of which require some tactical command—I started to wonder if I’d ever once actually been strategic about life. Had I actually plotted a path that brought me to where I am now? I’m not sure. I think I’d just done whatever had felt right at the time. Maybe I’m just a hedonist, or maybe at some point (likely in 6th grade when some girls had found my diary, where I’d ranked the popular kids in order to assess where I could mine some social capital), I had moralized ambition, internalized that acknowledging my peers as social, academic, or professional competitors (which of course they were, just as I was to them) was problematic.

But more likely there is a sociological element to why strategy feels kind of irrelevant to life, and has for some time. Ask 50 people when they think things started to feel dicey, and I’m sure you’ll get 50 different answers. But certainly by the time I entered college in 2015, right as Trump was coming up and it seemed like any crazy shit could really just happen, attempts to plan my life beyond, say, two years, began to seem a bit ridiculous. Nowadays, any time I talk to my friends about saving for retirement or having kids, as if institutions are reliable and climate change doesn’t exist, there’s always that gnawing sense that we’re all being delusional.

“What is different about us as individuals compared to previous generations is minor. What is different about the world around us is profound,” Michael Hobbes from wrote in a spectacular 2017 essay for Huffpost’s Highline called “Millennials are Screwed.” “The touchstone experience of millennials, the thing that truly defines us…is uncertainty.” Some amount of certainty, at least with whom/what one is in conflict and in what landscape you might encounter them, is necessary in designing a plan of attack. In actual wargames, there is an uncertainty mechanic called the Fog of War, which hides, say, the opponent’s location or arsenal. But even games with a Fog of War mechanic do not call into question the structure of the game itself. In reality, everyone’s disoriented, facing an increasingly volatile environmental and economic future. If we can’t trust the ground beneath our feet, what’s even the point of thinking ahead?

There is a lot of literature starting in the mid-2010’s about how uncertainty and anxiety are rampant among young people, but as I looked into this condition and its effect on strategy, I found something else about the Highline piece particularly striking: The package design happens to be video game-themed, as if to say that life is a game one plays, and that for millennials and their successors, it is one they’re doomed to lose.

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For the sake of research, I obviously had to watch Oppenheimer, which I had managed to avoid until now. Frankly, I thought it was a little silly: They really wanted us to buy the Sexiest Physicist Alive narrative, so much so that they flattened all the complexity of “I am become death” into throwaway foreplay. In the context of its source, a story from the Bhagavad Gita about a warrior prince whose cosmic duty is to fight against an army that includes his friends and family, “I am become death” is a meditation on fate versus free will. To its own detriment, Oppenheimer barely handles that question, but it was on my mind anyway when I leaned over my desk last week to ask a designer on my team if he’d seen the latest episode of FX’s Shōgun (war, again). Soon enough we were down the wargames rabbit hole and ended up talking about the old computer game Civilization. I asked him what he thought it taught him as a kid. He said, “To learn to lose.” Hard to argue, when here we both were, having been ushered into cubicles by forces bigger than our aspirations, doing “creative” work for a corporate marketing department.

But still. I can’t draw you a map of the terrain, but I think there’s a middle ground between “life is a winnable war” and “the game is rigged.” So okay, the cowards in the Academy might’ve given Oppenheimer Best Picture; we know the Oscars is a racket. On the other hand, consider the serious critical acclaim for a movie as batshit and unmarketable as Hundreds of Beavers, and tell me there isn’t still at least a little room to play.

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Cydney Hayes is a writer and journalist based in San Francisco. Her work has been published in Entertainment Weekly, Architectural Digest, Paloma magazine, 48 Hills, and elsewhere. She writes the Substack newsletter Discussion Candy. 

*Note: I am currently travelling, so today’s bonus issue looks a bit different. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s Sunday Letter, guest written by a brilliant writer friend of mine.

Here’s the part where I apologize for my delay — I’d hoped to publish a news and link round-up yesterday, covering everything from the Princess Kate news, to advice on finding confidence for new writers, to a list of links on my radar this weekend, but then. And then. And then.

As always, life got in the way. Instead, I’ve spent the past week in complete panic mode, between packing for an international trip, trying to pre-write ‘content,’ and trying to keep my head above water at my actual job. I don’t think I’ve slept for more than 30 minutes since Thursday evening. Now here I am on a Saturday afternoon, writing you a letter from an airplane 35,000 feet in the air somewhere over Florida. I haven’t slept for more than 30 minutes since Thursday evening, but did I mention that already? I’m staring at the back of my best friend’s head as I type these words to you in the notes app. My plan is to start from scratch and write for the next 3 hours until we land, and whatever is complete at the end of the flight is what I will send to you. No links, no buttons, probably very little editing, and just one painting by Jeanine Brito that I had saved already.

*

Here’s the part where I tell you I’ve been losing my mind. I want to say it started a few weeks ago, as this trip drew nearer and work got hectic and my creative obligations started to pile up. “It’s my month of NO,” I exclaimed to my husband from an Ottawa hotel room a few weeks ago, travelling for work. I was thrilled by the new opportunities, both creative and professional, and felt more capable than ever before to take on more and more responsibilities, to stay visible in both realms. But I thought I might be drowning again too.

*

I keep toying with the idea of starting an advice column, but every time I try, I became overwhelmed at the thought that anyone might think *I* of all people might consider myself enough of an expert on anything to give advice, let alone on writing. A year ago, I would never have believed that I’d be in the position of being not just visible, but overly so (at least to me, sick as I can become of hearing myself talk). The writers I’ve long admired are now only one or two degrees removed, some have even become friends as a result of this project. Does that ever start to feel normal?

I always thought it would be easy: I’d write when I felt like it, I’d publish a ton of work, I’d interview and be interviewed and I’d get to have the best of all of it. But earlier this week, as the deadlines loomed, I had an overwhelming sense that no minute could be wasted. I couldn’t start one task, because there were at least 10 others more pressing. I had a clearer sense of how my mind felt before I’d started taking ADHD medication in the fall, after a prolonged mental health dip that I can only describe in retrospect as a sort of OCD-induced mania. Even now, I can still only gesture to that time as, “back in the fall,” because I don’t remember when I stopped drowning, only that I did, and it was easier once I realized, yet again, that L would always be the one to throw me a floatation device, even when I might not feel I deserve it.

That story from Emily Gould in The Cut that ignited a huge conversation on personal essays, divorce, marriage, and mental health? It hit closer than I’d like to admit, especially in how she turned so far inward and away that she no longer recognized herself, only her most steadfast convictions.

Back in the fall, my longtime therapist asked me a question that reshaped my entire worldview as it related to my own mental health. “Do you recall having these intrusive thoughts as a child, and if so, do you remember how you felt about them, and whether you felt shame as a result?”

I almost laughed. “I doubt it,” I replied, explaining that I’d always been able to distinguish between my ‘real’ thoughts and the intrusive ones. If anything, my lack of OCD-related childhood trauma was clearly a sign that the disorder had only worsened in adulthood as a result of undiagnosed ADHD.

And then the dip. I didn’t see my therapist again for months, scared to face her in case I wouldn’t have “real” to talk about, in case I’d be stealing her time from someone that needed her attention more. “Let me tell you something,” she admonished gently at a session in late November, “everyone needs a space of their own. Especially now.” As I described the events of the fall and how I’d become convinced that I was living the entirely wrong life and needed to run away and start over, she was shocked. Having known me for over 5 years, she could already sense that I was returning to her from outside of reality. And then it clicked: “Remember when you asked me if I used to judge myself for my intrusive thoughts as a kid?”  I asked. I reminded her how I’d thought it impossible because I was always highly aware of their presence and therefore believed myself to be in control of them as well. “Well I just realized something. Judging myself for those thoughts is the only thing I’ve ever really done.”

*

I haven’t slept since Thursday evening, and as I stare down into the airport’s waiting area from the terminal above, I find myself watching a couple as they dance in the oversized baggage area. Not a waltz or two-step, but just that little dance that lovers do in public when one does a shimmy and the other does it back. A woman walks past the tall windows of the airport and refracts into eight versions of herself marching in synchronicity, snapping me out of my 4 am daze, unsettled at the sudden mirage of marching women.

I stop to grab a bottle of water as I wait for my flight. I spot a massive head of curly hair and a familiar freckled smile, and I say… “Rachelle?” It’s the parents of a childhood friend of mine, on their way to Toronto to see their other daughter. They ask me to sit, and we catch up on the last ten years. Marriage, work, family, friends. These people who welcomed me into their home when we were 6 year olds playing in overalls, when we were 10 having our first all-night sleepover, when we were 16 drinking in their acreage backyards, settled in tents under the stars. “How is she these days?” I ask about their daughter. She’s a neuroscientist, studying a field similar to my own mom. She lives in London with her boyfriend and they say I should visit her soon, see the great flat she’s living in. We pass along our most sincere well-wishes as they stand to board their flight, but first her dad stops me and says what my childhood friends’ parents always say, “You’re all so lucky you had each other. And now look at you all. We couldn’t be more proud.” A group of women who grew up together and graduated and scattered into MA and PhD programs in different fields across the world: engineering, medicine, health, law. I don’t feel like a child around them anymore; I feel like their peer. But it’s 5 am and I haven’t slept since Thursday and so instead we just look at each other, marvel at it all, and laugh.

*

L was telling me about a Canadian legal case that boiled down to a disagreement over the word “forthwith,” as it pertained to the collection of evidence. To solve the issue, the lawyers looked to the French translation of the same law, where the word “immediatement” was used instead. I replied that in my own work for a bilingual organization, I often translate documents from English into French and vice versa. As a result, I’ve become more aware of my vocabulary when writing in English, knowing that the passage will later need to be translated. Surely writing is like this too, the awareness constantly of how one might be read. It would be one thing if I was publishing these words on a website that you would have to look up to read. It’s another entirely to type it all out knowing that the moment I hit “Send,” thousands of people might see my name on a screen and have an instant reaction that I can neither anticipate nor control. I wrote about that tricky feeling for Haley Larsen’s wonderful interview series Close Reader:

“I will admit, as the newsletter grows, I do feel an increasing sense of anxiety over being vulnerable online. It’s a feeling I used to get after publishing each issue, but lately it’s been happening while writing as well. I’m reminding myself that it’s perfectly normal to have anxiety about sharing your innermost thoughts with strangers week after week, and that it’s a trade-off I’ll gladly accept in favour of having a creative space entirely my own.”

I spent over a month with Haley’s thoughtful questions, trying to put to paper my own ephemeral relationship to creativity. Other new writers ask how I come up with ideas for what to write. I explain that it involves combing through an abundance of chaotic thoughts and ideas as a way of constant narrowing. I tell L that some writers are sculptors who start from scratch with a mound of clay, building it up into something from nothing. Others, like me, are sculptors who must chip away at a massive rock until a pattern emerges. I’m the latter, and I don’t know how to be the former. I grew up around sculptors and painters and local theatre actors and directors and I never thought I was one of them until I realized that I needed their mediums to make sense of my own.

*

There’s a Kate Berlant line that goes something like, “The thing you set out to make will never be what you end up making. Never ever.”

I don’t often end up in the place I thought I was going, but that’s half the fun. I don’t always know what I have to add to any conversation until I’m in it. I don’t know how to look at a work of art without wanting to get in there and make it myself too.

Sometimes I feel like I’m half here, half there. Sometimes one side requires more of me. Sometimes both sides require all of me. The other day I found my first grey hair.

*

I write best when I’m not writing, because that’s when I’m the most honest with myself, when I’m not trying to be. But I have to move fast to catch it, and when I do I get butterflies.

It’s actually a great relief to realize you can’t and won’t please everyone. That you won’t be the first to the scoop every time, and that there’s excitement in that too. In fact, some of my favourite writers are the ones who don’t even follow a discernible ‘beat’ — they are the beat.

So it’s okay to be late to the party or early to it, to be out-of-order or ahead of it. It’s okay to be the only one in your lane as long as it’s the one you want to be in.

*

Back in university when we were so busy with finals, we could go days without fully speaking despite living together. I would invite L into the shower with me as it was often the only time we could stop to breathe and talk. I was remembering that time fondly last night as he collected my piles of clothes from the ground and sorted them neatly into my suitcase. “Here’s where I’m putting your shoes,” he said, “here’s where I’m putting your sunscreen.” I’d just come from the psychiatrist’s office to discuss how my recent dose increase has been going. I’d come bursting into the appointment apologizing for my dishevelled appearance and frantic, hungry eyes. How to explain that I’m the happiest I’ve ever been, the most clear-eyed in my sense of myself and my abilities, when my blood pressure tells a different story. “That’s so nice to hear,” the doctor says. “It’s just, your heart… It’s not slowing down.”

A few hours later I was back in an airport, waiting to reunite with my best friend and her dearest friends too. To fly to our destination, we first go east against time. None of us have slept since Thursday. We decide the airport Chili’s is the ideal place to be on a Saturday morning at 8 am. Is there anywhere more liminal? As I write this on the plane, a message comes in from our friend who is connecting through Toronto. She’s already at the hotel, reporting back that “it’s the most liminal space…”

*

We’re stuck on the tarmac as the plane’s wings are de-iced. The woman to my left keeps asking her companion if it’s time to turn on her cellular data yet. “Are we roaming yet?” she asks. “Not yet,” her younger friend replies, “not until we leave Canada.” They chat for the entire trip, and I still can’t tell how they know each other. Are they friends? Coworkers? Relatives?

“Oh, I love that,” the older woman exclaims as her friend pulls up the flight map on her screen, “Can you dropship it to me?”

The pilot announces that we’ll have to do another maintenance check before we leave, and the plane groans. The woman wants to know when it’ll be time to turn on airplane mode. Her friend tries again to explain that she won’t need it until we actually leave the ground. “I see,” she says, leafing through the contacts on her phone as the pilot announces another delay. We circle the tarmac once more, but not before the woman has the chance to ask: “And airplane mode is….?”

We’re getting closer. When I look outside the window, it’s no longer pitch white snow blinding me, but a pitch white sun. I can see prisms of light through the prairie snow, still stuck in tiny flakes to the window beside me. There’s the ocean, the one I haven’t touched in 6 years. My best friend walks down the aisle of the plane and I gesture madly for a phone charger. I promise her that when we land I’ll stop working. We’re here for her bachelorette party, and despite all of our stress leading up to today, there’s still nowhere I’d rather be than spending an entire week with her on a beach away from my phone, my mind, my responsibilities. Just us, celebrating her.

The women beside me are trying to find out how many illicit cookies they can procure from each flight attendant. So far they’re at 5 or 6, and they giggle between themselves each time they think they’ve gotten away with something.

When the younger woman goes to the bathroom, the older one asks me if we’re staying in the area for our trip. She tells me it’s her first time travelling since her husband died 3 years ago, but that she’s excited to be doing so with her daughter-in-law. When the younger woman returns, we talk about her job, her work, her husband, her friends. It’s 30 minutes to landing, and she’s been sitting next to me typing furiously on my phone for the last 3.5 hours. “Better swallow or your ears will pop,” the mother-in-law whispers to her daughter-in-law, and she nods sweetly, if a little exasperated.

We’re about to land, so I will send this message soon. I haven’t thought this through fully, sending you what is essentially just my stream of consciousness. Maybe none of it makes sense — after all, I haven’t slept since Thursday. I want to take my head out of the equation, stop letting myself revise things to death. I’d rather see what sort of narrative takes shape without me intending for it to. The end hasn’t happened yet, we’re still in the air. But here’s the end I’ll write for you instead:

After a bumpy landing, we circle the warm tarmac, and already the hot sweater and socks I wore to leave the prairies are suffocating me in the tropic sun. The snowflakes have finally melted off the window. The mother-in-law turns to the daughter-in-law and says, “Are we roaming yet?”

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This week’s issue is a special collaboration with a local arts organization called The 525 and their exhibition, “Good Looking” by Delaney Yvonne.

A guide to the world of Sofia Coppola

The Virgin Suicides (1999) — Tied with Lost in Translation for the most popular of her films on Letterboxd, The Virgin Suicides was an audacious debut for the young Coppola. From her fluxional reflection of the joys and horrors of teenage girlhood, to her meta-analysis of the gilded cage from which she herself sprang, The Virgin Suicides shows early signs of the themes that would haunt her work for decades to come.

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Lost in Translation (2003) — A foray into auto fiction, Lost is believed to represent Coppola’s own ill-fated relationship with fellow director Spike Jonze (loosely portrayed by Giovanni Ribisi). Likewise, Scarlett Johansson’s character is a stand-in for Coppola herself, floating in space along with fellow traveler Bill Murray. There is a quiet sadness between the two, which they fall into easily, tenderly. Watching in quick succession with Coppola’s later work, I see more clearly her keen ability to imbue her films with characters who are both rich, yet miserable; miserable, yet optimistic; optimistic, yet unambitious. They are full of contrasts, heightened by their aesthetic sensibilities which mirror her own. It’s an impressive line to toe, to be able to compile a biting ethnography of the upper class from the inside, while still portraying it in such a way that it’s clear she could have ended up anywhere else (nor would she have really wanted to).

Marie Antoinette (2006) — “You never reach for anything,” Marie Antoinette’s lady-in-waiting says, both instruction and command. It’s through Marie that Coppola sharpens her feminine punk aesthetics, to varying degrees of success. The first time I watched the film, I was stunned by Coppola’s use of silence followed by thunderous synth while scoring Marie’s rapid ascent into womanhood as she ascends the throne as well. In fact, Coppola’s well-known for an anachronistic or unexpected needle drop, from The Jesus and Mary Chain in Lost to Spectrum in Priscilla. “She looks like a child,” one woman remarks early on about Marie—in fact, Marie’s perceived innocence is a mainstay throughout the film, and it is not until the end that we see how she has forced herself to become more capable, though it is of course much too late.

Somewhere (2010) — A man with a faded star watches as thin blonde women dance up down a pole in his room. He keeps nodding off when they visit; they keep coming back. In one scene, one of the women leans over and blows a bubble with her hot pink gum. The next time he wakes up there’s another young blonde in his bed: his daughter, portrayed by a preteen Elle Fanning. She’s come to visit at the Chateau Marmont—where he lives—leading him to realize that he needs to finally get his shit together. A nod to the dynamic between Murray and Johansson Lost in Translation (minus the sexual tension), while also a hint at the father/daughter relationship that Coppola would later revisit in On the Rocks (which I haven’t seen yet—is it worth it??)

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The Beguiled (2017) — One of Coppola’s more controversial works, the film features Elle Fanning, Kirsten Dunst, Nicole Kidman. Offering a thematic parallel to The Virgin Suicides by centering on a group of white Confederate women who are isolated to the point of madness, The Beguiled follows their descent into a wild sexual furor when a wounded Union soldier played by Colin Farrell arrives.

Priscilla (2023) — I wrote about Priscilla back in November, arguing that Coppola’s “strengths lie in adapting highly unusual biographies of iconic women into fables universal in their pain.” I’m not sure whether I would still classify her work as universal, but rather myopic with its insights. And yet despite her ostentatious visuals, Coppola seems concerned first and foremost with relationships. In Priscilla, a young woman realizes she’s become a doll in the doll house’s of Graceland. By Marie Antoinette’s end, she is with her husband and children who had sprung into the story fully formed the moment she first had sex.

Looking back at Coppola’s work, I’m intrigued by the recurring patterns, the frayed edges she can’t quit poking: the line between fathers and daughters, or husbands and wives. In chronological order, Coppola’s filmography has almost a fairytale quality. A group of sisters collapse in on themselves with grief; a lost young woman meets an equally lost older man; a young woman marries into a dark fairytale she doesn’t yet understand; a girl visits her hard-partying father to reconnect; a group of women go mad with erotic fervour; and a young woman marries an older man, only to be subsumed into his messianic charm. From my November review:

“From the first moment we see Jacob Elordi (of Euphoria fame) as Elvis, it is through the eyes of 14-year old Priscilla, witnessing a god from across a crowded room. My friends and I kept turning to each other in horror every time their ten-year age gap was referenced; accentuated by their height difference, he feels all the more like a wolf stalking his prey. He’s a perfect Elvis: boyish and tall, with a dreamy face tinted by a slithering darkness behind the eyes. 

One moment, she’s a normal teenage girl, and the next, there he is: the most famous singer in the world, turning his light towards her. She practically basks in his glory, which she manipulates to her own ends to achieve freedom from her family, school, and the shackles of an ordinary life. Yet once she arrives in Graceland, she realizes that the key to her cage has merely changed hands from her father to her boyfriend. He chooses her babydoll dresses, he instructs her in what to wear, how to dress, and how to behave. Keep in mind, at this point she hasn’t even graduated high school yet. 

She swallows the pain of his infidelity, trading it for the comfort of his hand in marriage, while he continues to treat her as a doll, pristine and pure. In a rage at her perceived nagging, he hisses, “I need a woman who understands that things like this might happen. Are you going to be here or not?”

As this Priscilla review notes, “Sofia Coppola’s girls want, but do not get.” It’s all the more agonizing then to watch Priscilla fumble through early adulthood into marriage and motherhood all while resembling a childlike doll herself. She aches and yearns, it’s what drove her into the arms of her idol in the first place; but he’s incapable of giving in to her, he requires that subservience to give him reason for living and being. The women around Elvis are no more meaningful than a plaything, with even his grandmother becoming a live-in caretaker for his wife and child. He’d become a messianic figure to his acolytes in his own search for meaning as someone deified without a sense of purpose of his own, and the waifish Priscilla can’t decipher how to provide it.

While unevenly-paced and lacking the sumptuous visuals that made Marie Antoinette so iconic, Priscilla feels purposefully claustrophobic, and it isn’t until *spoiler* our heroine leaves the man himself that we see her emerge as a fully-fledged human from the shallow drudgery of Graceland. Her fate is not unlike that of her mother, who we mostly only ever see frowning in her family kitchen. Unfortunately, Priscilla’s freedom only comes in the last frame. Worse still, the real Priscilla’s legacy remains deeply entwined with Elvis’, though the real tragedy is the years of her life she spent trying to save him, only to be rejected by him at every turn. 

Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla delicately, watchfully, and at times stubbornly. By the time Priscilla starts blowing up at Elvis the way he does at her, it feels completely out of place. But perhaps that’s the point, as she looks like a child having a tantrum. He laughs her off, continuing to hunt her down and wear her down until there’s nothing much left of either of them. It isn’t until she’s able to understand herself as a woman capable of desire outside of his gaze that she emerges from his gilded cage. It’s telling, then, that when she finally leaves, she’s wearing pants.”

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On the Menu

• Schrödinger's Princess: From #FreeBritney to #KateGate, what is it about a woman in (perceived) distress that captivates us so?

• Post-Oscars Thoughts, and an Update to #JusticeforMessi

• On My Reading List This Weekend

Schrödinger's Princess

As you may be aware, the internet is currently convinced that Catherine, Princess of Wales, is missing. She has not been seen publicly since December, having retreated from the public eye to undergo abdominal surgery earlier this year. Her ‘disappearance’ has prompted considerable outrage, with much of the internet refusing to believe the Palace’s established timeline of events. Questions abound over whether Kate has been institutionalized, kidnapped, or even worse, killed. “I wasn’t convinced before,” users comment on 20-part TikTok videos dedicated to Kate’s alleged disappearance, “but I definitely am now.”

Listen, I could care less about re-litigating any of the forensic timelines established by CSI: TikTok. What does fascinate me is the outpouring of (alleged) support for the Princess, with one TikTok user saying, “I pray this is not true, but I cannot leave a stone unturned in our search for Kate.” Not surprising, considering it was her 16th video in a series that had already earned her millions and millions of views, but alas. 

In a famous thought experiment, Erwin Schrödinger hypothesized that if a cat was left sealed in a box with both poison and radioactive materials, it could be considered both alive and dead at the same time; it is only through looking into the box that the cat’s fate is determined. But if a Princess goes missing in a castle and no one is around to film a conspiracy video about it, did she even really go missing? 

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In Vulture, Kathryn VanArendonk argues much too rationally, writing that “Two things can be true at the same time: Something weird seems to be going on with Catherine, Princess of Wales, and the internet has entirely broken our collective ability to see perfectly plausible explanations as likely scenarios.” 

Gone are the days when we would have been willing to accept the simplest explanation, placated by the sight of a cheery Queen and her chummy grandkids. Instead, as one Twitter user wrote, the scandal is a “masterclass in how the collective jumps to the absolute wildest conclusions despite information to the contrary being easily accessible.” It doesn’t help that the Palace seems woefully unprepared to deal with communications in the TikTok Age. Would her sister-in-law Meghan be launching an overpriced lifestyle brand if Kate was truly in dire straits? It doesn’t matter.

But just how did we get here?

In 2014, an online harassment campaign known as GamerGate began targeting women in the video game industry. From conspiracy theories and doxxing to threats of extreme violence, GamerGate laid bare the signs of the anti-feminist backlash to come. Ten years later, not only do we “refuse to stand up to far-right trolls,” we’ve uncritically adopted all of their same tactics and repackaged it through the moralized lens of an equally disturbing new subfield: online sleuthing. 

On TikTok, these sleuths are building massive ‘true crime’ platforms by speculating on real life cold cases. Building off the early success of podcasts like Serial and My Favourite Murder, some creators are going so far as to charge families of victims just for the opportunity to meet, in the hopes that the creators will cover their stories on their 1M+ follower accounts. While researching this piece I stumbled across an American mother’s blog in which she gleefully recounts her obsession with criminal justice and forensics. She writes, 

“I am regularly tasked with finding information for friends that are looking for the scoop or background on someone. And you better believe I know all of the tips and tricks an average person can access to help them find what they’re looking for. Google Earth, police scanners, flight trackers, arrest logs, background checks – there is so much information available out there that it has started to make me rethink my own online presence at times.” 

She lists all the different Reddit, Facebook, and TikTok groups of which she is apart, each dedicated to speculating on crime and justice. “I can see part of myself in them,” she writes about the victims in the cases, “Mix that with being a nosy empath and I am compelled to help, even if from behind a computer screen across the country.” At the end of the post, she admits that the community does have its faults: “Known for outlandish theories, doxxing people that are not actually involved…and flooding tip lines with things they see on TikTok; there is definitely a line that should not be crossed in these nationwide cases.” And while she notes that you should only believe “about 5%” of what you read online about any of these cases, by her own admission she spends most of her free time speculating on them anyway. 

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This frenzy is not just specific to true crime communities, either. Last year, two women were doxxed by TikTok users after they were recorded in the background of another user’s video making fun of her. And remember Couch Guy? It was only two years ago that he went public after his doxxing, writing: “I was the subject of frame-by-frame body language analyses, armchair diagnoses of psychopathy, comparisons to convicted murderers, and general discussions about my ‘bad vibes.” As Rayne Fisher-Quann wrote in 2022, “trying to seek and destroy the lives of real people for a perceived moral fault that’s more posthumous justification than actual instigator is the choose-your-own-adventure for the 21st century.” 

As Caitlin Dewey writes, our hyper-paranoia has intersected directly with the destabilization caused by the pandemic, in which we are all suddenly faced with constant threats of danger, real or imagined. In 2021, Emma Berquist wrote an article called “True Crime is Rotting Our Brains,” in which she argued that the proliferation of true crime podcasts was making us all a lot more paranoid. 

Berquist, herself a survivor of a violent attack, is not flippant about the reality of violence against women. Yet she argues that the rarity of such an attack did not quell the tabloid magazines that hounded her for interviews while splashing their covers with headlines meant to convey that “danger is all around.” In trying to heal from her own PTSD, Berquist notes that she had to learn to recognize her own hyper-vigilance as a trauma response in order to ignore the constant messaging of a society telling her she needed to stay afraid.

“All these things—constantly looking backing behind you, carrying a safety device, always being hyper-aware—these aren’t normal ways to live,” Berquist writes, “And yet I see women proclaiming that this is necessary, that this is the way you need to move through the world as a woman.” In fact, it’s alt-right grifters like Sen. Katie Britt who peddle these vast conspiracies as a way to further entrap (and radicalize) fellow ‘concerned’ moms. The line between concern and radicalization is a very financially lucrative place to stake your claim, Caro Claire Burke argues, noting that it’s a content strategy that certain writers on this platform know very well. 

In 2002, the late queer theorist Eve Sedgwick published an essay on the state of critical theory in which she lamented the rise of paranoia amongst other public intellectuals. We are convinced that the more paranoid we are, the more likely that we won’t ever be taken for suckers, and so we must wake others up to their own false consciousness by bringing them in to the conspirational fray. Recalling a conversation with a friend that took place at the start of the AIDS epidemic in which Sedgwick speculated as to whether the virus had been deliberately engineered, she remarks that her friend argued that it didn’t matter; even if it was proven to be deliberate, “What would we know then that we don’t already know?” 

I’ve been thinking about that question a lot in the past few weeks. Even if all of the most horrible theories about Kate were true—from William’s alleged ‘role’ in her ‘disappearance,’ to her mental stability following resurfaced allegations of infidelity, to a vast network of murder cover-ups and conspiracies—what would we know then that we don’t already know? That interpersonal violence is a real threat for women? That if given the chance, grown adults who have never cared about the Royal Family in their entire lives are willing to go full Swiftie if it means being the first to solve a case? 

Now consider the opposite. Imagine it turns out to all be false, and Kate turns up at an event in a few months having fully recovered. We’ll all say we’re glad she’s okay, that we always knew she was probably fine, that it was all just for fun. But how many people, even though they would never admit it, would feel just a little bit disappointed, too, at the absence of scandal? 

The decision to disclose private health information to the public is a loaded one. I’ve seen little mention of how Kate has struggled with a pretty severe pregnancy complication known as hyperemesis gravidarum, a condition characterized by nausea and vomiting so severe that it is alleged to have been the cause of Charlotte Brontë’s death in 1855. Instead, the fervour focuses on how she’d appeared publicly just days after given birth all three times, as though that’s a standard anyone should be expected to uphold. And while sharing one’s health battles can have a positive public health effect, it also comes with a lifelong stigmata that can be used against you at any time. For celebrities like John Mulaney and Ben Affleck who disclose a struggle with drugs and alcohol, all future appearances will be scrutinized against the accusation that they are off the wagon. Not only that, but their partners will be scrutinized too, as evidenced by the very weird reaction to Olivia Munn’s recent cancer diagnosis.

Consider Freddie Mercury, who died in 1991 from pneumonia after living with HIV/AIDS privately for over four years. Having been hounded for years over his sexuality and health status, Mercury asked his manager to release a public statement confirming his HIV/AIDS diagnosis and acknowledging that he’d preferred to keep it private to protect the privacy of his loved ones. He died twenty-four hours later. Conversely, when Chadwick Boseman died in 2020 from a cancer no one knew he’d had, fans rushed to argue that we should all think twice before commenting on a celebrity’s appearance. Of course, that’s going really well!

Twenty years ago, Eve Sedgwick argued that the paranoid cycle would always continue, spreading outwards, infecting every interaction by relying on an absence of trust. It’s a self-reinforcing prophecy; by constantly trying to anticipate pain, we rarely seek to mitigate it. Yet no amount of paranoia can ever truly insulate us from harm, not entirely; and while paranoia tells us that we must stay vigilant against bad surprises, it leaves little room for good ones. Hope can be fracturing and traumatic, Sedgwick argues, but at least it offers instructions to rebuild. Can paranoia say the same? 

I’m well aware that the landscape of clickbait and SEO, paranoia sells. There is nothing an algorithm loves more than the chance to get you hooked on a conspiracy, especially if it starts as a joke. Our brains are so wired to seek approval and connection that we ignore all other signs pointing towards Occam’s razor and choose instead to believe information that is not just false, but actively counterfactual. The ‘video evidence’ of an ambulance leaving Sandringham in December that the Nieman Lab calls “a smoking gun”? It was posted by a royal-watcher whose only tweets since have been spent mocking Meghan and Harry and spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine. Forgive me if I’m not exactly compelled by his ironclad testimony. 

In the infamous Mother’s Day photo, Kate sits with her three children, one of whom will succeed her after she (presumably) becomes Queen. That’s two future monarchs in one photo, expected to maintain a dreadfully-antiquated institution for generations to come. What a weight to carry. Now listen: I know we’re all waiting for Taylor Swift to save us from AI, Trump, and the existence of winter, but I’m choosing to believe the totally unsubstantiated rumours that she may “have already recorded 2 music videos for her upcoming album,” as a sign that she is on her way to end KateGate once and for all. Just one more easter egg-loaded music video, Taylor. Just one more and I promise: it’ll fix everything. 

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Post-Oscars Thoughts, and an Update to #JusticeforMessi

Despite awards seasons that feel longer and longer every year, this year’s Oscars weekend seemed relatively quiet (helped along by the Mother’s Day snafu heard around the world). As for the actual show:

Martin Scorsese had fun (and that’s all that matters)!

Carey Mulligan’s husband carried her around backstage (as he should)!

Despite my concerns, Messi still made it (pre-taped, but still)!

And last but not least, we all learned valuable lessons about typography and how the smoking section makes you hotter.

On My Reading List This Weekend

• What’s the price of a childhood turned into content? (Cosmopolitan)

• House passes bill that could lead to TikTok ban (AP)

• Catherine Lacey looks back on an interview with Renata Adler (Untitled Thought Project)

• Olivia Rodrigo’s team reportedly tells abortion funds to stop handing out emergency contraceptives at her shows (Jezebel)

• Kate Wagner goes “behind F1’s velvet curtain” (Escape) in a story F1 apparently doesn’t want you to read, thereby becoming part of the story itself.

• Andrea Long Chu on Judith Butler and the moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies (Intelligencer)

• Big animal news: scientists are throwing a sex party to save the conchs! (Vox)

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His morning breath. My favourite perfume. Our first apartment. The milk in the fridge that went bad. The bonfire next door. The peonies she grows in her garden every summer. The glass of wine I order with supper. The deli on a Sunday morning when no one else is around. Dinner on the stove. A clean set of sheets. The candle burning next to me in bed. A dirty diaper. A hot cup of coffee. The bleach on the counter. His beard after kissing my thighs. The salt in my hair as it dries in the sun. Me. You.

*

A recent study found that 25% of college students surveyed would “give up their sense of smell in order to keep their phone and nearly half of all women would give up their sense of smell to keep their hair.” In fact, smell is the least-valued of the other senses when compared to sight, hearing, touch, and taste, but it is also one of the least understood. 

For much of history, as Ashley Ward writes in LitHub, humans believed that diseases were “borne out of noxious smells.” Throughout centuries of devastating epidemics, the blame fell to the smell of the filth rather than the filth itself. Ward quotes social reformer Edwin Chadwick who declared in 1846, “all smell is disease.” As Rachel Syme argues in The New Yorker, smells are inextricably linked to their context: “What we smell depends on what’s in vogue and what’s valued–on what cultural forces happen to be swirling in the air.” 

Take the perfume practices of today. As Naib Mian writes in The Nation, perfume is both “metaphor and material. It is both a structure and a subject, a medium for storytelling as well as an object with its own history and power.” As the perfume industry obscures its production process through the vocabulary of “cleanliness,” Mian argues that a division is established “between the pure and the polluted”:

“Compounds like indole, the rotting and dirty underside of floral scents as well as of the bodily fluids that accompany sex and desire, are extricated and sanitized in much of the perfume produced today…the colonial project and forces of capitalism that exploit labor to drive down the costs of raw materials, crippling local economies, or the environmental devastation committed in the name of colonial profit.” 

The ‘clean’ label is thus used to launder the reputation of an industry built on exploitative labour practices meant to keep the cost of raw materials low, all of which devastates local environments and economies in the service of smell. “Sex and desire,” Mian writes, “extricated and sanitized.”

*

Smell has often been considered the least reliable of the senses. Ward argues that the Enlightenment era “placed a premium on vision as a means of verification,” linking sight with logic and smell with emotion. Plato believed that “smell was linked to ‘base urges,’” while others considered it “animalistic.” In The New York Times, Brooke Jarvis argues that smell has been denigrated and misunderstood for so long in part due to a belief that it was largely vestigial, a “sometimes pleasant but ultimately unimportant holdover from our distant past.” Then the Smell Renaissance arrived.

In 1991, scientists Linda Buck and Richard Axel revolutionized the field of olfactory studies by cloning the neural receptors that detect smells. The two even won the Nobel Prize in 2004 for their work on proving the incredible complexity behind the human olfactory system. But in the years since, little attention has been paid to smell (or the loss of it, for that matter).

Known as anosmia, smell loss was thought to be rare and not nearly as dire as the research on hearing or vision loss. Why divert valuable time and energy away from more important causes in order to study something as frivolous as smell?

*

“Our nights were full of instant ramen and clementines,” writes Leslie Jamison in her new memoir about divorce and single motherhood in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, “My fingers smelled like oranges all winter.” This is the type of otherworldly detail that stops me in my tracks. I would never think to connect an emotional memory to a scent, because I’ve never actually experienced scent at all. 

In first grade we learned about our “five senses” and how to describe our experiences with them, such as hot and cold or quiet and loud, light and dark or sweet and salty. But when we got to the unit on smell, I realized something was wrong. The teacher was explaining how scent molecules travel up the nose, alerting the brain to the smell, and I was totally lost. People can taste flavors…through their nose? I wondered. I ran home to tell my mom about the discovery. Before long I was meeting with ENT specialists and neurologists, all of whom were tasked with identifying whether there was something seriously wrong with me, or if it was a bizarre genetic fluke. After an MRI, nasal endoscopy, and one last-ditch trip to a naturopath, I learned that there was no material explanation for my lifelong smell loss, and there probably never would be. 

*

Before 2020, even doctors who spent their entire careers studying smell knew that “most people simply don’t consider the sense to be particularly interesting or important,” writes Brooke Jarvis in the NYT. Dr. Claire Hopkins, a rhinologist, told Jarvis that she’d spent her career trying and failing to get funding agencies to take scent studies seriously. Despite her pessimism, in early 2020 she decided to alert other UK doctors to the rising cases of smell loss she was noticing in COVID-19 patients. In doing so, she helped to usher in a new global understanding on the importance of smell. Suddenly experts across the world were finding themselves uniting over their research:

“There were neurobiologists and otorhinolaryngologists, virologists and food scientists. There were chemists and data specialists, cognitive scientists and nutritionists, geneticists, psychologists, philosophers — an indication of how complicated the interplay of smell, taste and human life is. Like Hopkins, many of them were used to their work being as underappreciated as the senses they studied.”

As one doctor told Jarvis, most people are “unaware smell is important until they lose it…and then they’re terrified.”

*

I have been reading a novel called The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan. It’s about a young musician  who wakes up one day to sudden, unexplained hearing loss. As her hearing degenerates, she prepares for “the sincerest strain of quiet” by recording a score of her year. 

In the vein of Rachel Cusk, the musician encounters exes and friends, strangers and lovers, all while tenderly moving inwards as the world outside gets quieter. “I could hear my voice more clearly now, she writes, “and even when I wasn’t speaking my thoughts felt somehow louder. I had become nearer to myself.” 

The narrator references Edmund Husserl, a phenomenologist who proposed “that even in the instant when we speak to ourselves silently, there must be something like a tiny rip that divides us into the speaker and the hearer.” But for the narrator, this division of the two selves that occurs at the moment of speaking has become “imperceivable.” She becomes attuned to the sounds happening inside of her, a delicate turn for a novel narrated by a musician. She hears her eyelids when she blinks and her heart when it beats, and she wonders if the two are in opposition:

“The blink and the heartbeat moved in contrapuntal motion. It was like an argument over how time should be divided. Punctuated. Wounded. Like this. No, like that.” 

Callahan, who wrote The Hearing Test, also experienced unexplained hearing loss as described in the novel. After doctors diagnosed her with Sudden Deafness, they “ruptured her eardrum and filled her ear with steroids.” The treatment worked for a time, but when the issue returned she was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease that attacks the nerves in the inner ear. Likewise, much of The Hearing Test’s clinical elements are haunted by a looming sense of the unknown. As one doctor tells the narrator, “We can get to the moon…but we can’t get to the inner ear.” 

I read my husband the line about the blinking and I ask, “Is that what it felt like for you?”

Like the narrator, L’s hearing loss was gradual at first. Imperceptible, even. We were in our early twenties and we’d just moved into a rundown one-bedroom basement unit near the university. We were living away from home for the first time, learning how to cohabitate in a space so cramped that we spent more time on top of each other than anywhere else. I was head-over-heels, but I was also noticing that I was repeating myself a lot around him. “It’s like you’re not even listening to me,” I’d say over and over, until finally we realized that he couldn’t hear me in the first place.

Our families joked that maybe he just needed his ears cleaned, so he drove to a walk-in clinic and asked. The doctor looked into the canal and said that everything looked perfectly fine—the first sign that everything is not, in fact, fine. My husband could barely hear the snap of the doctor’s fingers, but when the doctor tapped the bone just behind L’s ear he could hear it perfectly. He was referred to a hearing specialist who confirmed a diagnosis of otosclerosis, a condition in which abnormal bone growth within the ear impacts the conduction of sound and leads to hearing loss over time. In other words, the bones in his ears will continue to grow and impact until eventually no sound can pass through at all. 

The hearing specialist was an older woman who wore colourful hearing aids in both ears. She fitted my husband for a bone conduction hearing aid, which sits an inch or two outside of the ear and transmits sound through the skull. She had me stand on the other side of the room and speak in a whisper. He heard me easily, leaving me incredulous at how much worse his hearing had gotten before we’d realized something was wrong. We couldn’t afford the hearing aid at the time, and over the next eight years as we married, got a dog, bought a house, etc., its urgency fell away. I’ve learned to be more patient with repeating myself, to turn to face him when I speak and to sit to his right when we are in public. 

All the while, the bones continue to impact, narrowing the space for the sound of my voice to cut through. 

In The Hearing Test, one of the doctors recommends “abstaining from anything that might give way to heightened emotions, from weddings to surprise celebrations, unexpected deaths to orgasms.” He asks the narrator if she experienced any such heightened moments in the time leading up to her hearing loss. She writes of the doctor’s “pleasure that comes from finding something you didn’t realize had even been lost.” 

*

In the NYT, Jarvis writes about the wave of people experiencing smell loss for the first time during COVID-19. In studies, patients “described themselves as feeling adrift – disconnected from a world that felt wrong, uncanny, confusing.” Early on, doctors studying the survey results of over 40,000 people noticed a strange pattern: the COVID patients that lost their sense of smell didn’t report any of the expected nasal blockages. Instead, they described the smell loss as “sudden and creepy,” which was out of step with ‘typical’ smell loss following a virus. Doctors were also noticing that smell loss was more common among COVID patients than a fever or cough was, and “yet schools and restaurants and airports continued to use forehead thermometers to screen for fevers.”

It took took months for the National Health Service to list smell loss as an official symptom of COVID-19, and even then Hopkins argued that it was much too late, owing in part to a “world that had spent far too long not taking smell seriously.”

*

In the online document where I store all of my writing notes from the past few years, I hit CTRL+F and type the word smell to find 21 results. Is that a lot? In comparison, I’ve mentioned the word love 301 times. In the entries where smell is mentioned, it is usually in the context of anxiety or loss:

“What did it smell like in his hospital room at the end? I can’t stop wondering.” 

“Can he smell it on my breath?”

“If I try too hard to smell him, I almost choke on the nothingness. It’s too sad.”

I’m trying to find the words to explain to you how the absence of a sense is the absence of memory, of an entire sensory dimension.

In Dirt, Daisy Alioto writes about losing her sense of smell during COVID. She describes sucking in air through her nostrils as she tries desperately to find “the olfactory equivalent of a word on the tip of your tongue.”

I spent my childhood feeling isolated and disconnected owing in part to feeling like there was an entire shape to the world that I would never be able to experience. In my happiest moments I find myself subconsciously breathing in, as though I might taste the memory on my tongue.

Now countless others are learning for the first time the emotional linkages between scent and memory, scent and time, and I don’t feel vindicated, not one bit. 

*

As I cook dinner on the stove my husband walks past me, sniffing the air.

“How’s it smell?” I ask. Spare no details, please. Tell me it smells like our first apartment. Tell me it smells like the deli on a Sunday morning when no one else is around. Tell me it smells like me. Tell me it smells like you. Tell me…

“Oh, sorry,” he turns back to face me. “Did you say something?” 

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On the Menu

• Anna Marie Tendler Announces Her New Memoir

• Oscar Predictions 2024

• The Celebrity Book Club Complex

• Justice for Messi the Dog!

• Monica Lewinsky Says “Vote!”

• In Other Celebrity News: Paging Jonathan Safran Foer…

• Happy Dune 2 Weekend 2 All Those Who Celebrate

• On My Reading List This Weekend

Anna Marie Tendler Announces Her New Memoir

Photographer and multidisciplinary artist Anna Marie Tendler surprised fans this week with the announcement of a new memoir coming this August.

Fans immediately began to speculate as to whether Men Have Called Her Crazy (are we sold on this cover and font, friends?) would divulge any details about Tendler’s marriage to comedian John Mulaney. And while I hope Tendler continues to coast off that speculation to her secure pre-order bag, “sources” have already confirmed to TMZ that her memoir makes no mention of Mulaney or his new partner Olivia Munn. I said as much on TikTok three days ago when I predicted that Tendler’s memoir would follow in the path of Emma Forrest’s Your Voice In My Head and Julia Fox’s Down the Drain by not naming Mulaney at all. In a way, I argued, it would be the ultimate form of revenge.

As writers and artists, Forrest and Fox both share in Tendler’s experience of being overshadowed in the public eye by the spectre of their exes (Colin Farrell and Kanye West, respectively), yet neither of them actually name the men in their memoirs. Forrest refers to Farrell with only a nickname, and Fox relegates West to the last chapter of her book as if we needed any reminder that he is but a blip in her epic life story.

There’s been some predictable backlash to Tendler’s announcement so far, with some asking whether it would be appropriate for Tendler to write about Mulaney’s problems with drugs and alcohol, even in the context of the dissolution of their marriage. Others have suggested that Tendler is a woman scorned in search of a cash grab (even though Mulaney has been touring his side of their divorce story in the standup special Baby J, which made it all the way to Netflix last year).

By not mentioning Mulaney at all, Tendler would be regaining her own autonomy after a few years of pretty intense projection around her choice (or lack thereof) in to live childfree during her marriage to Mulaney. As we all know, Mulaney went on to have a child with Munn pretty soon after his split from Tendler was announced. In my video I called the projection around her perceived victimhood “the Jon Hamm/Jennifer Westfeldt effect.” As LaineyGossip wrote last year, the common response around Jon Hamm’s recent marriage to actress Anna Osceola is eye-rolls (she is 35; he is 52; they married at the location where they met on Mad Men…). And because Hamm’s ex-partner of 18 years, Jennifer Westfeldt, is much less famous (despite being an accomplished writer), detractors often paint a picture of him as the philandering ex who traded in the older model for a younger version. But as LaineyGossip points out, the presumption that Hamm led Westfeldt astray without giving her a ring or kids for eighteen years only to marry someone else hasn’t been substantiated by Westfeldt at all. In fact, it could have been the exact opposite: that Westfeldt was steadfast in not wanting children or kids and the relationship ended as a result.

All that to say, I relish the chance for a woman in the public eye to reclaim a bit of agency over her own story, in any shape and form. Besides, Tendler is a longtime artist and photographer and I hope this book re-establishes her as such.

Oscar Predictions 2024

The Oscars are this Sunday, which means that soon enough we can all stop pretending that Oppenheimer was a good movie. Sorry, but please say sike.

For those of you participating in a betting pool, I’d say there are at least a few nominees you can consider a sure lock to win:

• Best Actor & Best Supporting Actor: Oppenheimer’s Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr, respectively (yawns). If any Oscar voters are in still in line to nominate Zac Efron for The Iron Claw or Charles Melton for May December, stay in line, there’s still time to make it right.

• Best Actress & Best Supporting Actress: Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon has a slight edge over Emma Stone in Poor Things, so I’d say it’s Gladstone’s to lose. Still, I would have loved to see Greta Lee preserve some of her early momentum for Past Lives. Conversely, Da’vine Joy Randolph has been the sure Best Supporting Actress winner all along for her gutting performance in the otherwise just-fine The Holdovers, so it will be lovely to watch her take her well-earned victory lap.

• Best Picture & Best Director: Oppenheimer’s to lose, innit? Listen, I hope I’m wrong. I wish we could have seen Past Lives’ Celine Song nominated for Best Director, and Anatomy of a Fall would be almost too-good for a Best Picture pick. So it seems it’ll be Oppenheimer’s night, while we wait for Song’s next throuple project.

• Writing (Adapted Screenplay): Not to say that I hope Barbie wins, even though it’s in the wrong category, but I do think Gerwig & Baumbach deserve something for their efforts (apart from the billion dollars). I have yet to see American Fiction or Zone of Interest (blame the movie theatres here thx!) but I hear American Fiction could be a lock for this one over Oppenheimer. And sorry to keep shitting on Oppenheimer but this is also exactly what I sound like when I’m a real human physicist building a machine to accelerate electrons:

• Writing (Original Screenplay): I truly can’t decide with this one. Between Anatomy of a Fall, The Holdovers, Maestro, May December, and Past Lives, my instinct is to say Anatomy will win, so we’ll see whether that holds up after the Sunday broadcast.

Who are you favourites to win this weekend?

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The Celebrity Book Club Complex

SEO-heavy hitter Emily Gould returns to The Cut this week, this time asking: “Does every famous woman have a book club now?” Emily, baby, you must not know about this little place called BookTok.

She’s not wrong—I’ve written before about how the influencer/intellectual divide has become increasingly blurred, but celebs have known for a minute the value of a book stylist to help them appear well-read. The celeb book club isn’t new either (See Oprah, Reese, etc.) but the new crop of younger actresses who are funnelling their book clubs into production companies is indicative of a rising trend. Last year, there were plenty of headlines about how Margot Robbie, Emma Stone, Kristen Stewart, and Sydney Sweeney were branching out as producers of their own films; since then, each has commented on how freeing the dual role of producer/actor was for them (not to mention the financial benefits of having options outside of acting). And while Robbie, Stone, Stewart, and Sweeney don’t have book clubs (yet), Gould does mention that Dakota Johnson’s newest foray into the book club space is likely a move towards producing the books as well. It’s a smart move, considering Johnson has that inherent coolness needed to market a product based entirely on her own aesthetic capital. I’m curious, do you follow any celebrity book clubs, and do you see there being a saturation point when it gets a bit old, or are we already there?

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Justice for Messi the Dog!

Despite rumours that star canine actor Messi would appear at the Oscars on behalf of Anatomy of a Fall, fans (me) were dismayed to learn that Messi’s invite got lost in the mail. Apparently, a recent nominee luncheon was the last straw for the haters, who got him banned from the show for being too good of a boy:

“After all, being a dog, he was not technically a nominee. Multiple companies with nominated films complained to the Academy that allowing him to attend the event gave Anatomy of a Fall an advantage during the voting window, according to a source with knowledge of the complaints.”

Rumors are already swirling as to who could be the Tonya Harding to Messi’s Nancy Kerrigan. Let Messi speak!

Monica Lewinsky Says “Vote!”

Last week, Tracy Clark-Flory went deep on the recent Monica Lewinsky x Reformation campaign and the milquetoast feminism behind these ambiguous marketing ploys tied loosely to an aesthetics of ‘empowerment’ through voting and consumerism. “This campaign isn’t meaningfully selling women on voting so much as it is selling them the feeling of voting,” Clark-Flory writes. Given the allegations that exist surrounding Joe Biden, it’s interesting to see that the person being used to launder the his image is Monica Lewinsky. Oh, the magic of capitalism in washing away the sins of the world.

In Other Celebrity News

If your partner is making a movie about your marriage and ScarJo shows up to play a character, run!

Natalie Portman divorces her husband and everyone starts paging Jonathan Safran Foer.

Anne Hathaway is starring in the Olivia Wilde Story and Hunter Harris has the breakdown (it really is 2 crazy bitches telling each other exactlyyyy)

America Ferrera is apparently set to play Cuban artist Ana Mendieta in a new series… Hmm!

Lastly, The New Yorker is reporting that UMG and other music studios are undergoing some pretty high-stakes experiments with AI. Real bold move for Sofia Richie’s father-in-law (and CEO of UMG) Lucian Grainge, who has a habit of showing up at the scene of every crime…

Happy Dune 2 Weekend 2 All Those Who Celebrate

AKA me because I’m going to see it tonight… 🪱

On My Reading List This Weekend

• Amanda Montei and Leslie Jamison in conversation on motherhood and memoirs (Electric Lit)

• Magdalene Taylor on why it’s all obviously the phones (Many Such Cases)

• We’ve forgotten what real skin looks like (The New Statesman)

• Daisy Alioto on cicadas and Flaco (Dirt)

• Why I hope my parents won’t read my novel (The Guardian)

• Uncovering the higher truth of Jay Shetty (The Guardian)

• Rachel Cusk and Merve Emre in conversation on the end of character (The Yale Review)

• What a major solar storm could do to our planet (The New Yorker), from Kathryn Schulz, author of “The Really Big One,” who was just born to terrorize, I guess.

• Kate Zambreno says literature shouldn’t be about empowerment (Dirt)

• A miracle drug for cystic fibrosis and what happens when a death sentence is unexpectedly lifted (The Atlantic): “To plan for such a miracle would have been foolish, but to live in its unexpected aftermath can still be painful.”

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The Sunday Letter #53

It is 3:30 am on a Wednesday. I spent the evening before my flight packing a tidy set of clothes for the plane, laying out my boots, bra, and floss. In my carry-on is a set of business attire for the days I’ll be spending at the office. We are out of the house and on the road in fifteen minutes, ducking into the airport to avoid the frostbiting wind with families dressed for the tropics. 

I feel like I’ve only ever seen this airport at the crack of dawn. Memories of waking up at 3 am with my family to drive my mom to the airport for various academic conferences. Eating Tim Horton’s in the lobby with my dad as we waited for her plane to take off, stopping by the gift shop on the way out and begging for a new Webkinz to take home. 

This morning the security line is quiet. I pass through quickly and arrive at my gate with time to spare. I take a few ginger tablets and hope that the protein bar in my hand will help to keep my usual travel nausea at bay. I board the enormous plane to see that it’s only a third full. I take one last look at the prairies before closing my eyes. I’m on my way back to Ottawa through Toronto, and as I drift off, I remember the last time I visited my old college town.

*

It was June 2023, and I was in town for my (very delayed) graduation. A few days before leaving, I’d gotten a bright red gel manicure on my long nails, one of which broke the day before my flight. I returned to the salon in a panic, explaining that I was on the way to my graduation and only needed to fix one finger. After they kindly fitted me with a free extension, I took off to Ottawa to reunite with a campus I hadn’t seen in person in three years. In the Uber back into the city, I was amazed at how much looked exactly the same: the red brick houses, the sleepy tree-lined streets leading into the downtown core. I’d treated myself to a stay at a boutique hotel, and as I unpacked my clothes for the ceremony I jammed yet another nail on my suitcase, breaking it for the second time in as many days. I called around to every salon I could until I found someone to fix a single nail. I sat alone at a pub across the street from the salon, drinking a pint and waiting for my appointment time. I walked in, embarrassed to be there so close to closing time. The manicurist took my unsteady hand and gently glued on a replacement, the colour not quite matching the rest of the set, and I left clutching my hands tight to my chest to keep them safe. 

Despite my nerves, the graduation ceremony was a tonic. After years of grappling with undiagnosed ADHD and the grief of losing my father, I would finally be able to say that I completed my degree. The wound of failure had been replaced with a sense of relief and closure as I finally walked across the stage:

“I opened the envelope to ensure that I’d received the right diploma, that my name was on it, that it was finally all over, for real. But as I looked down at the names on my degree, I was hit all over again with the weight of the last few years. There was my first name, for my dad’s mother and his sister. My middle name, for the aunt who raised him when his own mother couldn’t. My last name, carried over to me from Chile across multiple generations and a multiplicity of paternal wounds. None of it should have been possible: his escape from the dictatorial regime of his homeland, his landing in the middle of Canada totally alone at only 27 years of age, his eventual courtship with my mother two decades later. And here I was, holding a degree that he never got to see me receive.”

The city that welcomed us both was now giving me the space to say goodbye.

*

After the ceremony, I returned to the hotel bar alone to read Sontag’s On Women and wait for an old friend to arrive from Chicago. Drinking a glass of red wine and cutting into a bloody steak, I felt gluttonous and free. I snuck out for a quick smoke as my friend turned the corner and waved. We hugged and I felt him breathe in as he said, “You smell exactly the same.” We walked over to a craft brewery where I ordered a beer that was too sour and he complained about an unrequited crush on his classmate. At some point he said, “For what it’s worth, I think you’ll make a great mother.” We paid for our drinks and I waved goodbye, wondering whether it was for the last time.

The next morning, with the graduation complete and no other obligations to attend to, I made my way to the used bookshop in my old neighbourhood. The barista and I made sleepy small talk as I told him I was visiting from out of town. “Would you ever come back?” he asked, snapping me out of the flirty banter and into reality. Could I ever move back, even if I wanted to? I just smiled at him, taking the iced matcha and letting LCD Soundsystem on the speakers wash over me. The joy I felt was warm and made up of sonic grain. I picked up a Joan Didion book and sat next to a young couple writing a travel itinerary on their laptops. “I’m just worried we won’t have time to do everything we want to do,” she whispered sadly, “And I don’t know if we’ll be able to go to Dave & Buster’s.” 

I leafed through my book, eating a chocolate croissant while the young woman turned to flip through her Snapchat stories. Her boyfriend watched her phone from over her shoulder, stopping her to say, “Wait, who was that?”

“Oh, just some guy,” she blurted out.

“Which guy?” he asked.

“The guy! I’ve told you about him. He just snapped back to my story.”

“Who?” the boyfriend sounded genuinely confused, pushing her for more details. “We don’t chat, we just used to hook up,” she shot back, “I’ve told you about him and I’m not telling you more. There’s no context. There’s really no story.” She was beginning to raise her voice.

“What’s the context?” he pushed. “We matched on Tinder,” she started to giggle, “and you’re making me nervous! He’s chill. It’s not a thing, and I’m not rehashing it with you.” 

They both go silent. After a beat she asks, “Are you mad at me right now?”

“It’s very suspicious,” he said. “What is?” she begged. He collected his things to leave and she shuffled out after him. 

I spent the day popping in and out of my old haunts, running into old classmates and laughing at how small the world really is. Another old friend picked me up to grab tacos and a drink. He spent the dinner talking about his girlfriend, making sure to say enough good things about her that by the time he rounded the corner on everything that wasn’t going well, it landed more softly. He offered to drive me across town to meet up with my cousin, and when we were alone in the car I tried to be encouraging.

“It sounds like you’re a good couple,” I told him, “You still try to communicate even when there’s…” “Issues,” he interrupted, catching us both off guard. We were silent for a moment. He hovered his hands on the shift near my knee and said, “We’re working through it.” I closed the door behind me and waved goodbye.

My cousin had moved to Ottawa from my hometown when we were still young, and as we reconnected over drinks I wondered how it felt like no time at all had passed between us. One day we were trading secrets in the backyard playhouse, collecting bugs, playing pretend. Then with a jolt we were suddenly adults, and I was meeting her cool friends for patio drinks on a balmy evening as they debated whether to join a roller derby team. “You can meet women there!” my cousin tried to convince her friend. “Why would I want to pay women to hurt me,” her friend teased back. “Besides, I already let men do it for free!”

Then, on my last day in town, I paid my respects to Maman. 

I have a special place in my heart for the National Gallery of Canada. The first time I visited was after moving to Ottawa in the fall of 2019 for my Masters degree. I’d taken a class on feminism in art history the previous winter, so I was familiar with Louise Bourgeois’ spider series. What I was not prepared for, however, was her looming size: over 30 feet of bronze, steel, and marble. Inspired by Bourgeois’ own mother, Maman represents fertility and security, a mother ready to spin a web around her young. I’ve visited her countless times, but I’ve only allowed myself to touch her once or twice, as though I am rationing her protection.

The gallery was showing a collection of Paul Gaugin’s work when I first arrived in 2019, and I wandered the exhibit full of hope for the program I was joining, the woman I was becoming. I purchased a coffee table book about Gaugin for my dad and brought it home for him over the Christmas break. His health was already much worse than it had been when I left; he was using up so much oxygen it was getting difficult to maintain a steady supply of tanks at home. When I showed him the book, he gasped. “You have to write me a message,” he directed me as he reached for a pen, “so that I know it was from you.” 

He left the house to move into long term hospital care that spring, a few weeks before Covid-19 became global news. I’d already moved home by then, and I stopped by their house to grab a few things before I made my way to the hospital to see him. Over Facetime, he asked me to write his signature on one of the completed paintings. “It’s done, it just needs to be signed,” he instructed me. Unsure, I picked up a small brush and a tin of black paint, and I followed another piece of his as an example. The signature had always resembled Picasso’s, a fact which made me smile as I tried to replicate it too.

Picasso, the man after whom he’d tried to model an artist’s life in exile. Picasso, who named his daughter Paloma. My dad, who named his daughter Paloma too. Paloma, Spanish for dove and peace. Years after he passed, I was looking through a few of his paintings when I spotted one with a signature that looked a little off. I stared and stared, trying to figure out why it looked so alien, until I realized it was my signature looking back at me.

*

The trip last year offered a sense of closure with this place I’d left so abruptly all those years ago, so I was pleasantly surprised when I was offered the chance to return so soon for a conference.

It’s Wednesday, February 28 and I just landed in Ottawa. I follow a man to the baggage claim as he lugs around a container of fresh lobster. “Siri, call Sarah… Siri, call Sarah… Siri, call Sarah…” he pleads into his Bluetooth earpiece. I rush to the hotel to change before meeting a few colleagues downtown for dinner.

I recently had an interview with a young journalism student who was writing a story about online personas. During our conversation, the student remarked that some young people approached social media as a public portfolio for their work, making their ‘persona’ a product in itself despite a general craving for authenticity.

I wondered what authenticity could really mean in an increasingly stratified world, wherein the self that I present to others depends entirely on the context in which I am meeting them. I wonder about my disparate selves, what it means to be known as only one or the other.

I have been reading Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries, which she created by inputting a decade’s worth of diary entries into an alphabetized spreadsheet. The result is a dreamy and unsettling amalgamation of a self, split across ten years. The first lines of the novel, from chapter A: 

“A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have many things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by its binding...A kind of tyranny to think about beauty and love all the time, when there is really nothing to think about”

Really nothing to think about. Yet in ten decades of disassembled diary entries, Heti has clear patterns. A few pages in, and men have already made an appearance. In rapid succession:

“A man must part company with the inferior and the superficial. A man of discretion. A man to love. A man who could physically kill me in under a minute is a man who is easy to sleep beside. A man who goes out in the world and gets what he wants for himself. A man who I could have in the center of my life, even a child, and my family could fit themselves into the healthiness and happiness of that. A man who would be mine… A new relation to life. A new relationship, born from the ashes of the old and dead one. A new tone, a new ringtone.”

Apart from a few names that appear periodically, the novel is largely without plot or characters. By shuffling her thoughts, Heti affords herself a remarkable sense of privacy. Suddenly the self becomes obscured behind the distance afforded by the lack of genre. It is autoform, wherein she moulds an entire oeuvre into a new shape to serve a constructive end. I wonder if she could identify the year she wrote every sentence. I wonder if I could too, or if the patterns eventually obscure into nothingness across time. From chapter E:

“Everyone feels bad, everything was ruined, but what if something was also created?… Everyone said how good we looked together. Everyone telling me these days that I look so good. Everything has to be sacrificed for writing. Everything I have done in the last while I have done with Lars in mind--dancing, painting the hall, cleaning out the stairwell. Everything is more beautiful and glittering in my mind than it ever is in real life.”

*

After the conference, a few of us spill out into the pub across the street, the night bleeding into a conversation amongst acquaintances, old and new. A stranger in her fifties asks me if I’ve heard of “this show called Curb Your Enthusiasm?” I shriek, “I love that show!” as we immediately grasp at each other’s hands only to whisper, “Wait, have you heard?” It’s been two days since Richard Lewis passed, and we commiserate over the sudden shocking loss. 

Is life too short? You think it’s too short? It’s too short, isn’t it? 

I speak with the woman for nearly an hour, trading stories about our pets (she had a mouse that had recently passed), our families (she is fascinated by my dad’s history in Chile), and our hometowns (she is from the Atlantic Coast). Someone mentions books, and I ask her what she's been reading lately. Her eyes are already moist as she turns to me sardonically and says, “Charlotte’s Web, with my son. And I cry every. Fucking. Time.”

Eventually, the conversation turns back to the pet mouse she’d recently lost. “The crazy thing is,” she whispers, “I know I’m being irrational. I know it was just a mouse but… I was there, you know? I was there when it passed, and it was a three which was like a lifetime in mouse years, and I just… You feel connected. And to be there when a creature passes just…changes you. You know?”

I nod; I do know. I want to stay close to her forever. “I even went to a counselling circle,” she laughs, “I just needed to shake it off. But then of course I got there and everyone’s there to grieve their dogs, I just felt even worse. Look at me,” she points to herself, “this fool grieving a goddamn mouse.” 

She leans in to me and says, “I don’t know how you could ever let yourself go through that with a dog.” 

*

Later that night I meet up with an old friend of over 23 years. Reconnecting with her for the first time since last summer, I feel like no time has passed. “What were we talking about?” I say, and she already knows what I meant. “That was last summer, right?” she says, “I remember you were still thinking about taking that new job.”

“Oh yeah,” I laugh, “that would be the one I’m in now.” I eat tomato-drenched calamari as we trade stories about the past year. When the waitress brings our cheque, she asks what we’re up to next. “That depends,” I say, “what day is it?” She laughs, “tell me about it.” But I genuinely don’t know. As we step out into the frigid air, I forget for a moment who, where, and what I am.

I tell my friend about the older woman I’d met earlier, the one who had been so betrayed by her own capacity to love a living creature that she vowed to never adopt a pet again.

“I think the grief is already built in, though,” I tell my friend as we make our way back to her place. A few weeks ago, I was so overcome with grief that I thought I might have a panic attack. I caught my breathe in between sobs, and suddenly felt lucid enough to try and sink into the pain of the grief rather than look away from it. In doing so, I began to laugh at how good it felt to bask in the sorrow with unmitigated joy. It was a feeling of acceptance that took four years of grief to alchemize; in the depths of it, I felt all the love that still existed between us.

I explain this all to my friend as we wait outside her apartment. Her dog is leaping all over me, leaving tufts of soft white fur all over my coat. I look into his sweet eyes and laugh, missing my own dog at home as he tries to lick my face.

The grief is already built in. If given the chance I would still take the grief. Every time.

*

I pay for an extra night at the hotel so that I can spend Friday in the city alone. The sun has finally emerged and it feels like a crisp spring day outside. I venture back to the bookstore cafe where I overheard the couple fighting last year. I sit next to another couple, this time on a first date. The young man flirts with the woman across from him by asking if she uses Snapchat.

“I know some people who break up but keep Snapping so they can keep their streak,” he says.

“Wow, that’s soo crazy,” she says. “Yeah, Snapchat’s crazy,” he agrees. “So, you use Insta, then?” He teases her, asking if she’ll post a story about him after their date.

“Wanna go look at books?” he asks, and as they get up to leave he says, “I don’t actually read…it just seemed like something I should ask.” 

I’ve been carrying my laptop across the city with me, but have no energy for creative work. For weeks I’ve been waiting to finally have time and space to write, and now that I have it I don’t know what to do with it. Two women are seated next to me, complaining about another friend’s boyfriend. “I should’ve trusted my initial vibes,” the blonde says to the brunette.

I close my laptop and call an Uber for the National Gallery. I have to go see Maman. 

The night before, I’d told a few coworkers from out of town that I would be spending the day with the giant spider outside the gallery. Unfamiliar with her magic, they scrunched up their noses and said, “A spider?”

When I see her again, I wait for the space to clear out before approaching. I touch the edge of her leg, marvelling at the scraps of bronze and steel of which she is mightily composed. A man hovers in the distance taking photos, so I pass him my phone and ask him to take a photo of me standing beneath her.

He seems confused. “Are you from here?” he asks.

I laugh. “Yes and no.” 

Inside the gallery I stop by to see my other favourites: Klimt, Gaugin, Matisse, Rothko. The Jean-Paul Riopelle exhibit featuring a series of work completed after the death of his longtime love Joan Mitchell.

As a teenager visiting the Art Gallery of Ontario for the first time with my dad, I watched him make a beeline for the Picasso portion of the exhibit. “Look, you can still see where he made a mistake and covered it up,” he marvelled at one painting in particular.

Standing alone now, I observe the painting as I’ve done countless times before. I relax my eyes into the pentimento, trying to spot the mistakes. But of course my eyes fall to the signature, the one my father had emulated as a young artist making his way in a new country after being exiled from his own. The one I’d tried to replicate when I signed one of his last paintings on his behalf. My name, marked across time and space.

I stop at the gift shop, helpless to a stack of David Zwirner books on display. When I finally make my way to leave, I turn left and walk straight for a block or two until I come across my old favourite hole-in-the-wall. I sit next to a glamorous young French woman and order a diet coke and escargot.

I take out one of the new books, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Painter, and the French woman turns to ask, “Qu’est-ce que tu as là ?” I show her the others from the same set, pointing her in the direction of the gallery. If we lean out the window, we could probably see Maman from here.

She says she’s from Northern Quebec, but she lives here for school (law). I want to keep talking to her, to crawl into the mop of curly red hair on her head and stay there. The old door clangs open and her friend enters, stealing her attention away for the rest of the night. Last year, in this same restaurant, I wrote:

“I sit with my book in the upper mezzanine and order a glass of white wine and escargot. Sinatra’s New York, New York is playing and the waitress is singing along in a raspy voice, watching herself in the mirror behind me as she takes my order. She is young and has big glasses and a deep voice and after she congratulates me on graduating she bounces back downstairs and launches right into a conversation with a customer about dead old jazz singers. As I leave the restaurant, I’m struck with the realization that all the places I used to go in this city were always much closer to each other than I ever realized. Different people meeting in different places in a different time, and it’s all so far away now.”

The waitress arrives with my bill, and I realize that she is the same waitress that I wrote about last year. She seems too frazzled by the happy hour rush to chat. I wish she was still singing. 

*

The next morning I am back at the airport by 5 am to head home. The security line loops around a few times, and the woman in front of me is tentatively flirting with the man across the rope every time their spots line up. “Nadine, right?” he asks. She blushes and nods, asking him where he’s working these days. “Still in cyber,” he says. “Where you off to next?” she asks. “California,” he responds. 

“Oh cool. With your family, or…” she fishes. “No, just alone.” “Oh shit, well, I’m off to New York, but if you’re not busy…uh, want to grab a coffee?” she asks. He smiles back, rubbing the sleep from his eye. 

“I can’t wait to be home,” I tell L over the phone while I wait to board. It’s 6 am on Saturday morning where he is. He says it’s been so quiet without me there that he’s started having hours-long conversations with our dog just to stay sane. I smile at the older couple next to me, and as they shuffle nervously onto the plane they sit together, only to be separated when the other customers realize they’re in the wrong seats. Everyone continues to talk about the couple, who don’t speak English, in the third person. “I don’t think they understand he’s in the wrong seat,” his seat mates say. “Sir, you need to move,” they try to explain. “My wife,” he keeps saying, “I sit with her.” Eventually he moves to the row behind her, leaving her between two strangers. 

Once we take off, I try again to write, fighting with the wifi for half an hour to no avail. I feel my deadlines closing in on me, that old familiar sense of dysfunction I call The Wall. The baby across the aisle has been screaming on and off for an hour when I hear the woman behind me snap at the man’s wife, “If you don’t stop, I’ll have to call the flight attendant.”

The flight attendant arrives, patiently catching up to the situation. The passenger accuses the other woman of opening her purse and stealing her blanket. The woman cannot speak English to defend herself. “I’m so sick,” the passenger coughs through her mask. Over the sound of the baby’s wails she cries, “I just can’t fucking deal right now, I can’t fucking deal…” By this point, the pressure on the plane was reaching a fever pitch. With zero visibility heading into a prairie snowstorm, zero wifi, and a mounting sense of desperation, everyone in the vicinity agrees to swap seats to separate the two women and return the husband to his wife. 

I’ve given up on writing at this point, panic setting in as I try to capture fleeting thoughts in the notes app instead. I figure if I’m going to experience ego death, it may as well be on an overcrowded Air Canada flight to my hometown.

The pilot tells us to prepare for landing, but remarks that if the visibility is too bad we will have to turn around and land in a neighbouring province instead. We have about fifteen minutes to find out which it will be. In the pitch white, I feel my ears pop and my stomach drop. The young German boy in front of me screeches out, “I see it! I see land!” and a few seconds later the runaway emerges and the wheels hit the ground. The plane erupts in applause and we spill out and into the arms of our loved ones. My luggage emerges broken and snow-covered from the baggage claim but I am just so grateful to be home that I cannot find it in me to care. I turn on my cellphone’s internet, and as the iCloud syncs I see that the notes I’d hastily typed from the plane have transmogrified with the notes from earlier that morning:

“where you off to?” “california” “with your family or…” “by myself” “oh shit well, i’m off to new york so… if you’re not… grab a coffee?” the people around the man and with his wife who’ve been smiling at me, talking about them in third person. “i don’t think they understand. he’s in the wrong seat,” he just wants to sit next to his wife. “sir, you’ll need to move.” “my wife,” he says, “i sit with her.” she points to the distance and he says sure, they flirt a bit anxiously across the security line. “where are you working these days,” etc. “cyber.” “it’s nadine, right?”

I collapse onto my bed at home, emptying my pockets of the remnants from the trip. My gallery ticket falls onto the bed and I wonder for the umpteenth time whether I should have been collecting them all along, or if the memories will be enough. For now, I hope that they will be. 

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The Sunday Letter #52

Fifty-two weeks ago, after a longtime obsession with newsletters like Maybe Baby, Internet Princess, Hung Up, and so many more, I decided to commit to a weekly newsletter of my own. I had very few expectations for Solitary Daughter, but I hoped it would serve as a creative outlet and archive of my interests over time. Needless to say, I couldn’t have imagined the incredible community of readers and writers that I would find as a result of this weird little fever dream.

So, to celebrate one year of Sunday Letters, I’ve compiled an anthology issue featuring a few of my favourite writers in the world—seriously, I am in love with everyone on this list. Their only creative prompt was “love, whatever that may mean to you.” They responded with poetry, flash fiction, and essays that touch on everything from grief and loss to love born anew; from music and connection to envy and doubt; from loving in every language and liminal dreams to freedom and self-destruction and everything in between. I hope this issue is as much a treat to read as it was to compile. Also, how stunning is the cover art from Rowen Dinsmore? Ugh!

Lastly, I promised to send a Solitary care package to one subscriber, and the winner is Amrita! Thank you again to every single person who has read and shared this newsletter over the past year. It’s meant the entire world. ❤️

Subscribe now

Lily de Mellow-Orr

Lily de Mellow-Orr is a writer and poet based in Ireland. She posts personal essays on her Substack Wooing of Étaín and is currently writing a book on the death of John Keats. In her spare time, she enjoys instant gratification, maladaptive daydreaming, and walking around with untied shoelaces.

Turning, I knock over the smattering of tealights around the bathtub with my tote bag, kicking up rose petals and an unnamed feeling that has split out onto the floor. Disgust, maybe, and what the Germans call Sehnsucht – an awareness of absence, a recognition of something missing that one can never hope to attain. I’m privy to it all: candles and flowers and giggling in the shower and kissing in the hallway outside my bedroom door; I wish I could disappear. I am not yearning. I am not jealous. But I am angry that I’ll never mean as much to my friends as a man ever could. That I allow myself to be someone so easy to forget. That I have only known love as something that takes from me.

I have spent the winter despising the smallness of my own existence, shuttling between my rented room in the city and my parents’ house by the sea. I’ve suddenly found the time again to read articles and watch films and learn French, enough to begin translating a second-hand copy of Milan Kundera’s La valse aux adieux – a useless endeavour, considering an English version was published in 1987. Sometimes I go so long without speaking I almost forget how to do it in either language, voice creaking like floorboards when the Oxfam bookstore cashier asks me parlez-vous le français? But I cannot seem too eager. I’ve spent the last decade becoming well-versed in fortress-building, at locking my desires up inside myself like Bukowski’s bluebird, terrified to be seen as something delicate or breakable. The truth is, if you touch me I’ll bruise. I have always been a lighthouse shaped like a girl.

As a teenager, I believed that if I shrivelled up enough nothing bad would ever happen to me. This, of course, was not true. Like a piece of paper, one can only fold themselves over so many times before they spring back open again. The way the black hole, mid-destruction, remembers the star. One day, maybe, I shall return to burning blue.

Adele Zeynep Walton

Adele Zeynep Walton is a Turkish British journalist specialising in digital technology, inequality and social change. She is currently writing her first non-fiction book, which publishes in 2025. You can find Adele on TikTok and Instagram.

“When you treat yourself well is when you realise you have a place on earth” these words were found etched into my sister’s journal after she passed in 2022. Soon after, I had them etched onto my body as a tattoo. It’s been almost a year and a half now, and the words come to me often as a reminder of the simplicity of self love - treating yourself well. Not optimising yourself, not pressuring yourself, not wishing more of yourself or buying things for yourself. Of course those can be symptoms of treating yourself well (or not), but fundamentally, treating yourself well is simply all we need.  Releasing the critical inner voice and allowing ourselves to receive love. It’s no easy feat in a world that pressures us to be more and do more, to view ourselves as lacking and others as competition. But this scarcity is an illusion, and one that our survival depends on abandoning. Love is intrinsic to survival, and loving ourselves by being kinder inwards holds revolutionary power. Thank you Aimee for teaching me that. 

Abby Lacelle

Abby is a feminist researcher and writer located in Toronto, Ontario. Their work centres reproductive justice and motherhood. All of their love is reserved for their dear partner, Aidan, and their darling dog, Otto. Follow them on Instagram and Substack.

Love is a heuristic. My father once told me his love for me is conditional and I wonder if it still would be if he could imagine love shooting out from between his legs. Because I became inside my mother and she says she’d kill for me; and she means it. There aren’t conditions to that kind of love because she opened herself up to me and felt the (psychic and physical) pain of letting me back out. How could you condition that kind of closeness, sameness? The patriarchy keeps us from true eros. 

The heart is an inadequate icon for love; it’s too fixed an organ. It doesn’t really grow, it doesn’t make space. It isn’t an open system. A uterus holds us all; it’s constantly destroying and remaking its landscape. And, what’s more, I know you can love from your womb even without one, but some people are afraid to feel that way. Uterine-thinking is counterintuitive; too bloody, too intimate, too androgynous, too aporetic. It is at once deeply sensuous, (a)sexual, generative, hostile, and indiscriminately inhabitable. 

Love cycles yet is constant. It has stages and phases, it sheds and reproduces. When I tell you I love you, what I mean is I would carry you, I would care for you, I would let you share my body, I would give to you from my body. I would help you into and through this world. I will help you become. I love you from a deep, wet, gooey place. Not emanating from my chest, the locus is lower. Not from inside my heart, but behind my abdomen; you’re in my guts. 

Terry Nguyen

Terry Nguyen is an essayist, critic, and poet from Garden Grove, CA. She writes Vague Blue, a notebook-in-newsletters.

I struggle with movies where the form feels fixed, where the happy ending is written from the first glance. This is common with rom-coms and romantic dramas, but on a recent rewatch of Before Sunrise (1995), the Richard Linklater film that has set my standard for romance since I first saw it at fourteen, I realized that its script does something quite rare: It imposes limits on the love story, forecasting its end before it even begins. 

Before Sunrise is a meet-cute with no realistic future. On a train to Vienna, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meets Celine, a French student (Julie Delpy) traveling to Paris. They spend the rest of the ride talking, and Jesse convinces Celine to get off the train with him in Vienna. Jesse has to catch a US-bound flight there the next morning and, with no money for a hotel, was planning to wander around the city for the night. "If I turn out to be a psycho, you can bail out anytime and get back on the next train, right?" The stakes are low. And once the limits of this dynamic are established — that Jesse and Celine's time together will be the romantic equivalent of a one-night stand — the film derives its momentum from their chemistry-laden dialogue. We are enraptured by what happens between their meeting and departure though we are, of course, quietly rooting for that Hollywood happy ending.

My favorite scene takes place near the end of the night. The two are sitting on a bench, talking. Celine says: “I really believe that if there’s any kind of god, he wouldn’t be in any one of us — not you, not me — but just this space in between. If there’s some magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone else, sharing something, even if it’s almost impossible to succeed. But who cares: the answer must be in the attempt.” And that, to me, is love. It is not a lifetime, but the moment, the attempt at love that feels so precious and tragic and true. I love Before Sunrise because it treasures the liminality of loving. The answer is in each breath we take; love begins anew in every attempt.

Akosua Adasi

Akosua Adasi is a doctorate student and writer living in Brooklyn. She is also the mastermind behind Consumption Report, a semi-regular letter on the media and ideas that she consumes and that consume her. 

The philosopher Agnes Callard has said that she thinks of beauty as a gesture. What she meant by that was that beauty wasn’t a tangible, concrete characteristic or experience but rather a signal towards other affects—happiness, enlightenment, etc. I think that love, a form of beauty, is also a gesture. Love is a gesture, love gestures to. In Berman’s “Self Portrait at 28,” love is the gesture of turning one’s head over your shoulder, as if to depart without an expression of love—”love you!”—is to sever without repair. The “love you”, sans the “I”, tossed towards another’s retreating back. An indirect gesture that shifts the atmosphere. 

Love gestures to: trust; laughter; tears; long dinner parties; sledding on fresh snow; blood; presence; time; absence; grief; a song. 

Love is a gesture, love gestures to. 

Sara Jin Li 

Sara Jin Li is an award-winning & losing essayist, playwright, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. She is also the founder of Heretics Club, a literary salon for creative writers. 

in loving memory

What’s another way to say ‘I love you’?

I remember. 

The way you take your coffee. What you said last week. To call. Your birthday. Why you hate your father. Your childhood pet. Where you left your keys. How you got the scar on your hip. The last thing your sister said to you. What street you grew up on. How you met her. The secret you swore us to secrecy on. Your safe space. Your favorite drink. Your heart on your sleeve (I love the way it looks there).

A poem reminded me of you. So did the sun. I find you everywhere. Or I’ll sit in the park and draw your name in the grass. Look, there you are, too. This is how I love. If I loved you any less, I’d forget.

Namah

Substack | Instagram

crying on the subway 

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

on the streetcar before, I
felt the tremors of the schism. 
and on the scheduled bus after,
I clinically digressed to paroxysm…
felt less sure when it happened some more.

perhaps a funeral rite for something 
that I couldn’t name or hold. 
underground, burrowed below, 
eight thirty four 
is an appropriate time to mourn.

there is a man wailing into the automatic doors 
that open and close 
as if to respond yes or no 
(but mostly no)

and while my grief
has no name or face, 
a crop circle seems to have set into place;
no one wants to sit by the hysterical woman 
or the screaming man.

at Old Mill, the sunlight
glides across the streaks on my cheek
and I return to stone. 
this time,
when the doors open
it seems as though 
the wailing man has somewhere to go. 

Nic | bookbinch

Nic is a writer and fast-walker based in Montreal. He can be found online @bookbinch, where he peddles his queer book recommendations and shares his journey as a debut novelista. He also writes a bi-weekly newsletter called Milking It.

On My Sleeve

All’s fair in love and denim

My mother handed me a folded heap of denim and said, “Amuses-toi mon coeur.” The jacket fit perfectly around my shoulders and fell right above my hips–thank heavens for the oversized craze of the 80s.

It was worn, supple, not like its stiff modern counterparts, and it smelled like her. When I wore it, I was wrapped in J’adore Dior with hints of patchouli, butterfly kisses and lavender. The cloud that follows you when you wear a hand-me-down can feel like love.

Over time the jacket molded to my arms, creased with my sleeve rolls, had an unfortunate run-in with a glass of wine, but it never quite lost her… Until–

He yanked a folded heap of denim from my closet and asked, “J’peux te l’emprunter?” My prized possession in the hands of a man I loved. I never imagined parting with it, but I couldn’t say no to his eyes of emerald green–back then I didn’t know Jolene was a cautionary tale. 

My jacket flew to Greece. It spent a summer wrapped around my boyfriend’s waist, basking in the sun, and getting trampled by his European dalliances.

He gave it back to me when we broke up shortly thereafter. The poor thing was blue, limp and now reeked of him. Love can feel like spending months filling your nostrils with sweat, Tide (Cold Wash Original), prom night confessions and Old Spice remnants, hoping your tears don’t wash him out… Until–

I pluck the hanging heap of denim from a hook and ask, “Est-ce qu’il fait froid?” The jacket holds past lives of Dior and Tide in its tight weave, but in the present it smells like me. 

Friends laughing, long hugs, sandalwood, held hands–now that’s love. And sometimes, a jean jacket is just a heap of denim… Until–

Amani Hope

Amani Hope writes the two newsletters Read Like Mad and Bad Recipes and is currently writing a novel about love in the warm chair of an Oakland café. She went to the Academy of Art University for screenwriting, and more recently completed the Certificate in Writing program with UC Berkeley Extension to study the craft of the novel and the personal essay. 

How I Met a Boy at a House Party

Maya: Who is the guy who just came in?

Cat: lol what? why r u texting me I’m in the living room

Cat: and btw bring another bottle of champagne the party is running out

Cat: it’s in the fridge next to the cake

Maya: Who is the new guy, he was checking out my books.

Cat: lmao are you shy?! come over here

Maya: No. You come here.

Cat: omg

Cat: idk where you are

Cat: too many people in our apartment

Maya: Who is he? He’s tall with freckles.

Maya: And you can tell he smiles a lot.

Cat: omg are you in love already?!

Maya: Look he’s right by the window.

Maya: I first noticed him when he was standing at my bookshelf 

Maya: Cuz he pulled out my short stories by Anaïs Nin. The kind of stories which end in sex and mess. So embarrassing.

Maya: He found my bookmark and read for a long time. Do you think I should talk to him about it? I feel like he’s seen me naked.

Maya: Hold on he’s waving at somebody.

Maya: Wait, it’s you he’s waving at! He’s hugging you.

Maya: Cat Cat Cat.

Maya: Where did you go? Who was that?

Cat: hey sorry

Cat: oh shit are you talking about Takami? 

Cat: idk if this is right

Cat: why r u asking? 

Maya: Can you introduce us? How do you know him?

Cat: um yeah so

Cat: [deleted message]

Cat: [deleted message]

Cat: actually I totally think you should talk to him

Cat: in the way you want to like about your book 

Cat: or whatever 

Cat: he’s a childhood friend 

Cat: I wouldn’t have survived high school without him

Cat: you’re my best friend Maya

Cat: and I’d do anything for you

Cat: you’d love each other

Cat: […]

Brendon Holder

Brendon Holder is a Canadian writer living in New York and the author of the cultural commentary newsletter LOOSEY. His writing can be found in The Globe & Mail, Electric Literature, The Drift, and elsewhere.

One morning, on my twenty-seventh listen of Shania Twain’s ‘You’re Still The One,’ it dawned on me: this just might be the ‘struggle love’ anthem of our time. For years, I mindlessly listened to the song believing it depicted an idyllic, Hallmarkian love, one without strife and compromise. But, upon further examination, it’s more representative of a relationship of perseverance than peace. 

For years, I would tell friends that I didn’t want a ‘struggle love,’ that no love is worth significant labour but Twain’s songwriting convincingly details an adoration at the end of the hero’s journey rather than in the laborious middle. Whereas other ‘struggle love’ songs — Lana Del Rey’s ‘Cinnamon Girl,’ Sade’s ‘Is It A Crime?’ and SZA’s ‘Supermodel’ to name a few —  transplant you amid the hardship, the real work, ‘You’re Still The One’ locks onto the perspective of someone who has surmounted the doubt and emerged as the victor, their histories softened by time. 

Obviously, there are limits. There is a love and kindness in knowing when to call it, in acknowledging when something truly isn’t it for you any longer. New York Times bestselling author and marriage therapist Katherine Woodward Thomas clocks that not all struggle can be romanticized as “organizing around the weakest parts of others is ultimately not to anyone’s benefit,” the others included. But, beyond that, all love is work — romantic love, friendship, love of self. By denying this, I was lazy and potentially a tad delulu.

In closing, bell hooks teaches us that love isn’t a declaration, it’s an action and, through ‘You’re Still The One,’ Twain reminds us that some things are worth acting upon, continuously working for, and holding on to.

Tara Monjazeb

Tara Monjazeb (she/her) is an Iranian-American writer based in London. She is the author of Devotions, a poetry-centred essay newsletter, and is currently writing her first novel. 

Like most immigrant children, I grew up with an unconditional idea of love. More than feeling, it was partnership and sacrifice. My dad says that I love you is the strongest phrase in the English language, and should be reserved for your most intimate moments. I was in the passenger seat of his car in late July, driving down a dark tree-lined parkway away from the city. It’s where we’ve always had our most important conversations, where he warned me not to trust blindly, to be careful with the love I hold and to give it away cautiously. At that moment, under the gliding yellow of the passing streetlights, it felt like I saw through him for the first time. I always say I love you when I hang up the phone, even if he never says it back. I want him to believe that every time, I mean it. 

I don’t believe the love I have is limited. It’s produced in the same way carbon dioxide is when I breathe. I pass a bush full of flowers, and smell the aroma of the honeysuckles, and the feeling develops then and there. The moment I met my now-boyfriend, the love began to bubble. It was unlike any love I’d ever felt, though it comes from the same place as my love for my friends, my family, or the lavender bush on my street. It grew, seemingly out of nothing, and I held those words in my mouth, like something sacred, until they fell out. I use them often. Every time, they still feel holy. 

I wish I could say I moved abroad for love. In some ways, I did. I escaped the monotony of the American suburbs, searching for the kind of distance and isolation that would peel me raw and make me feel everything, deeply, like a sensitive wound in the breeze. It’s not painful. It feels nice. Like freedom.

Tia Glista

Tia Glista writes film and literary criticism about gender for The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Document Journal, and elsewhere. She is a PhD student in English at the University of Toronto where her research investigates the social, political, and interpretive demands of gesture and posture in feminist cultural production of the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

For DASH, knowing that words fail

When I found out my dog died, I wailed. I wailed “no.” I wailed for hours. I thought I might never be able to stop, that this was it now: grief. But also—it couldn’t be happening: it was just a dream, wasn’t it? I could still hear him scratching the door to go outside when I sat in the kitchen. His crate was still in my room, his bed was still inside and it smelled like him.

Dash died when I was away at summer camp, and so I never had the chance to say good-bye. He had had cancer, and in his final years, being away from any of us always stressed him so much that his symptoms augmented. My brother and I were both away that summer and we didn’t know what was happening while we were gone, while my parents tried to hold it together and take care of our beautiful, sweet lapdog. That was more than eleven years ago—people ask why we never got another dog to replace him (as if that were possible), but the truth is that he just hasn’t left yet. I still know viscerally the weight of his chin resting on my knee and just how soft his fur was. I can still feel these things. He’s still here and I hope he never leaves, or that we never let him.

I had been a scrappy kid who lived in my head, and when we got Dash, I found something to care about that was real. Nothing has entered my life since then that has been worth loving as much as he was. A good dog will do that to you—they will melt your heart, but you will always feel inadequate to the task of showing them that you love them as much as they love you. I don’t know if he knew that and I will always wish I… 

…That is the torturous thing about love—not so much that it ends, because it doesn’t (not really), but that there is never any assurance that you have made others understand they are as loved as they are. To acknowledge this total and utter fallibility of language is strange for a writer (my professor, the late Mari Ruti, once described writing as “the scene of surviving my own inadequacy”). But that is all I can say about love: that it is big enough to exhaust your capacities of explanation and therein lies the problem. It is impossible to make known, the scale of it is nothing that makes sense.

Briana Soler

Briana Soler is a writer and photographer in Houston, TX. She has been published with Paloma Mag and Mortal Mag and has a forthcoming piece with The Afterpast Review. You can find her writing essays on Substack, or you can find her on Instagram sharing her photos and musings.

UNENDING TRACE

Like someone in love, he said he met me in a dream. I smiled and didn't believe him. What would I be doing in any of his dreams? But then he wrote it in a song and the words became scripture. Snow makes me think of him, but then so does grapes, and the moonlight, and the hums of jazz. Love is fatal friends always told me. Perhaps the fatality they meant is that my life before him is dead. Life began anew when we met. Don’t get too attached ma would say. How can you love and not be attached? I asked. She raised her eyebrows at me like she always did when she thought I knew better. But it was too late. I already knew I was in love with him when he stayed up at night in his parent's kitchen making me laugh until the sides of my stomach felt like they might bleed. Life felt like a waltz. It has been a decade and then a year later since making that silly choice of letting myself fall in love. The love has changed and grown bigger than I could imagine. Loved stripped us of our layers and made us see more clearly. It shed layers of what I knew to be true about love. But love is a paradox because it also made everything more complicated because now life was shared in two. Love is fatal still rings in my head all these years later. My entire world takes the shape of him. Isn’t that what love is? We make ourselves powerless, weak in the knees over kisses and sweet words. You’re my best friend he tells me one cloudy day as we are eating in the kitchen. I scan his face and see all of me inside his smile lines and frown lines, I see us in the speckles of his eyes. I think of Cy Twombly’s splatters of red and pink on canvas–an explosion of feeling, inspiration embedded in the threads–creation. I do not know where I begin and he ends, and I have no intention of untangling us to find out. 

Arbela Capas

Arbela is a writer and editor based out of Cleveland, Ohio. She loves to gab about fashion, culture and tastemaking for her Substack, The Changing Room and her podcast by the same name. When she's not writing, she enjoys watching '90s rom-coms, re-reading Mary Oliver poems and hosting theme parties with friends. 

Holding Onto Tulips 

On Valentine’s day, my mother got me flowers. A bushel of cranberry-hued tulips with their petals beginning to spread out. “I’m so glad the store had them,” she said. “Because I know they’re your favorite.” This sentiment, catching me in the midst of a low week, almost brought me to tears. 

Because tulips are, in fact, my favorite and they have been, for as long as I can remember. It’s one of those things that have kept repeating over and over with every physical and mental phase of my life. My limbs have stretched, my eyesight blurred and my skin pigmented. And still, tulips remained my favorite. 

With time, I’ve acquired more favorite things — as well as a desire to acquire more. In the tornado of everything that I consume, I feel myself struggling to keep up with what my taste should be. Sometimes, I wish I wasn't so predictable with my interests. Yes, my favorite flowers are tulips but I’m almost 30, shouldn’t I have a new favorite flower? Something less ordinary? Less predictable? It can’t be tulips all the time, can it? 

But maybe some things don’t need refinement. Sometimes — it’s just tulips. It’s just the color lavender. It’s just the movie, My Best Friend’s Wedding that I continue to eagerly blurt out when asked, “What’s your favorite movie?” These are the objects of affection I’ve always returned to. The things I loved and continue to love, without hesitation. And more importantly, they’re the things I give away, freely, earnestly to others.

I take it for granted: the simple tenderness of someone remembering something about me. In a way, it feels like they’re taking a load off me. Because it sometimes feels heavy to carry ourselves — and everything attached  — around each day.

Similar to the future, our past is never ending, stretching, disappearing. And sometimes, I wonder: Where should I put it all so that it’s not lost forever? But the truth is, I’m unloading these things all the time. And the proof of that is in the phrase; “I’ll always remember that about you.” 

So if one day I forget — even for a moment — that tulips are my favorite flower, I hope someone I love reminds me. Because I’ll believe them.

Rachel Soo Thow

Currently residing in New Zealand, Rachel works full time as a Beauty Development Executive by day and a Bookstagrammer by the name of The Lit List at night. Rachel lives with her boyfriend who works in skate and their little darling pug Henry, and she has a TBR as long as her book reviews. Avid lover of all things carbs, the colour black and beauty and literature. You can also find Rachel on Substack.

As children we are taught to fear strangers, to look out for the unknown, to keep our eyes on the unfamiliar. But more often than not, the ones we fear the most and the ones most likely to do us harm are the ones closest to us. If I think back to my younger 13-year-old self, I felt like I was waking up every day having been introduced to the tragedies and comedies of life. The what-not-to-do’s, the achievements, and the confined space to which every day seemed like a haphazard compilation of love, loss, failure and art. Remember the first time you fell in love? That spectatorial gaze and the daydreams. This sort of enchanted concept that would take us to new emotional heights and elusive lows. Love at first sight. The butterflies that at one point I dismissed as a fundamental flaw in the concept of love – then again, was I just skeptical because I wasn’t in a relationship that was inherently stable? Perhaps.

I remember running around the rectangular wooden sandbox in kindergarten chasing after a boy that would soon also find himself at my primary school and then at the boy’s college round the corner for Intermediate. It was one of those things where our parents lived within the proximity of locals built on highlighting the compatibility of personalities – ‘oh she likes to read too!’, ‘his parents are nice, what is he up to today?’. As a shy young girl, I hated these comments. I felt like I was slipping into a cave smothered in superficial attraction and meddling neighbors. So, you can only imagine that my safe space was to avoid him at all costs – I’m sure he cringed about it all too. We never talked about it, but it seemed to be a general look of understanding of a ‘love that most certainly won’t blossom’ due to unstable meddling. 

I found myself fearing the unknown, longing for genuine connection and a relationship that would thrive. Is it any wonder that the 80’s and 90’s served rom-com’s that followed that ‘Head Over Heels’ formula? – fleeting moments of infatuation thrown into a pool of accidental compatibility. It continued to serve as a poignant reminder that there were plenty of fish in the sea, but when you’ve been burned too many times, that term just fails irrespective of how the Hollywood scenes depicted it should be. Having to protect yourself from the person you willingly let in. A crack in the formula. One minute I was being embraced by my other half listening to the concrete crunch beneath our footsteps; the next, I was throwing everything into the boot of my car as tears streamed down my face. Paralyzed by hope and fear, I wanted that same feeling of the initial embrace back in my life again. I wanted to be sought after. To have that almost decade-long relationship matter. I was stubborn. And I hated the fact that I was told that they loved me so much that they had to set me free. It was a total copout.  

What motivates us to love and to love so deeply? How do we love? And do we love with intention? I sometimes feel myself spending hours recalling those moments where that sense of romanticism made me feel safe. Wanted. Things aren’t the same as they once were, and things will never be the same now. Instead, I am but floating in the unfamiliar.

Art by Rowen Dinsmore

Rowen Dinsmore is an emerging artist and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours graduate from the University of Saskatchewan. Using a variety of mediums, including painting, printmaking, and video, the artist explores the topic of self-portraiture as a means to investigate identity and the self. She uses these mediums to develop layers that abstract and complicate the portrait. Influenced by social media and art history, Dinsmore studies what it means to be a woman in the modern era through an artistic lens, often approaching topics of spectatorship, the gaze, and the feminine form. Her work offers both a critique and an embrace of these aspects of the female experience in a post-internet world.

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On the Menu

• The Search Engine to Post-News Pipeline

• Why TikTok Is the New Water Cooler Station

• On My Reading List This Weekend

• What I Watched in February

The Search Engine to Post-News Pipeline

Vice is apparently dead, its online records soon to follow. Google is testing the removal of the News tab from its increasingly AI-reliant search results. News is dead, long live the news!

But really, what value does quality journalism have to a company willing to turn off news access to an entire country? Take Nest for example, Google’s extraordinarily successful effort to integrate itself into every facet of a consumer’s life. With over 52 million units sold, Nest has become the de facto home security system, streaming device, sound system, thermostat, smoke detector, doorbell, personal shopper, and confidante to hundreds of millions of people. And by making consumers so dependent on its services, Google has rendered its past as a reliable search engine obsolete.

While writing this, I had a flashback to 2009 when Google aired their first ever commercial. Any idea what they were promoting? If you guessed Google Search, you guessed correctly. The ad, which aired 15 years ago, has 8 million views on YouTube and features only a screen as various Google searches tell a love story in verse. The ad even earned a sequel in 2020, but this time, when the words “how to not forget” are typed into the search bar, they begin to fade away to sad music. “Hey Google,” an elderly man says, “Show me photos of me and Loretta,” and suddenly the music swells as Google Assistant fulfills the request instead. He gives more prompts, teaching Google about his late wife: “Remember, Loretta loved going to Alaska…and scallops!”

A few years ago, my six-year-old nephew spotted an unopened Google Nest on our counter and immediately offered to set it up. “It was a gift,” we tried to explain to him, “we aren’t keeping it.” He was perplexed. I mean, this was a boy who thought of Siri and Alexa as personal friends (and why wouldn’t he, given their ubiquity in his life?).

Google’s next step, presumably, would be to render our ‘real lives’ inseparable from our online ones, such that we become fully integrated with our algorithmic selves. Why bother to use Gmail if I can command a virtual assistant to send an email to my mother-in-law instead? Why search for information when I can ask Google Assistant?

I have to believe that there’s a tipping point, and that the potential loss of entire digital archives could be enough to shake us loose from our complacency. I’ve written previously that once our data is digitized, it “is both no longer entirely ours, nor is it entirely safe from disappearing completely.” So while our reliance on technology to compartmentalize our lives has given OpenAI the perfect opportunity to swoop in and offer exponential convenience at the risk of longterm environmental corrosion, it may also be true that the collapse of the human internet could result in something new entirely. What would we fight to save?

Why TikTok Is the New Water Cooler Station

Last week, a TikTok user named Reesa Teesa went viral for her 52-part series entitled, “Who TF Did I Marry?” As The Cut explains,

“Over the course of several days, [Teesa] posted dozens of ten-minute videos unraveling how she ended up dating, marrying, and eventually divorcing a guy she claims lied about pretty much everything in his personal life.”

Teesa’s videos have blown up, amassing millions of views and nearly 3 million followers. Besides her obvious story-telling skills, Teesa’s popularity also stems from how much fun TikTok users were having as they waited for every salacious new update. I saw users joking about cancelling their Friday night plans to stay home and catch up on the “episodes.” The experience was reminiscent of Twitter’s heyday, when you could still reliably find a community within the content you were consuming. Of course, whether that community is organic or a byproduct of TikTok’s algorithm encouragement is inconsequential.

On My Reading List This Weekend

• On self documentation: your iPhone notes app remembers all your past selves (Polyester)

• ’s brilliant ౨ৎ Girl blog, on the evolution of the online personal essay and why we should all strive to be more ambivalent with our ‘I’s. See also this tweet from Elisa Gabbert: “I am reluctant to make new marks in an old book my younger self already underlined… it feels like writing in someone else’s book.”

• “A dirty word for bitter girls”: an ode to blog era feminism (Polyester)

• Sheila Heti and Phyllis Rose in conversation: “During that first wave of seventies feminism, merely telling women’s stories was a political act, and deeply refreshing. All information about women was a gift.” (Granta)

• Speaking of Sheila Heti, Catherine Lacey’s review of Alphabet Diaries has me even more excited to read it.

• Alabama hospital puts pause on IVF in wake of ruling saying frozen embryos are children (AP)

• The gaudy promises of cool-girl underewear brands (Haloscope)

• “I think my husband is trashing my novel on Goodreads!” (The Cut)

What I Watched in February

Since my last report, I’ve watched:

• Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock, 1951) — Not my favourite of Hitchcock’s (may I suggest you just watch Rope or North by Northwest instead?) but it did hint towards interesting dynamics around virtuous men and ‘promiscuous’ women, such that even the main character isn’t entirely ‘good,’ even if the film paints him as such.

• Lost in Translation (Coppola, 2003) — I’ve been working on a project surrounding Sofia Coppola’s oeuvre, so in the words of Hari Nef, I “finally grew up and watched lost in translation.” Detachment and alienation as experienced through the eyes of both a jaded older man and an idealistic young woman. Released between The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette, Lost represents an early look into the themes that have continued to dominate Coppola’s work ever since.

• Saltburn (Fennell, 2023) — I just wanted to finally be part of the discourse, ok! I liked the visuals, but it’s pretty clear when a director starts with the visuals and works backwards from there (Coppola is not exempt from this). May I…suggest you watch The Talented Mr. Ripley instead?

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The Sunday Letter #51

“Almost every woman in the story of Jesus is called Mary,” writes Marina Warner in the London Review of Books. Sure, some of the gospel writers added a last name or a husband’s title here and there to distinguish them, but “more commonly, the Marys have combined and then divided, only to fuse again” with the other women in Jesus’ circle. There’s the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, then there’s Mary Magdalene, who has come to represent “the sinner we should aspire not to be and the saint we should desire to become.” The two extremes of women’s representations in the bible, the Madonna and the Whore, tied together by one name. 

Then there was Sarah, the barren wife of Abraham who eventually gives birth at the age of 90 to a son named Isaac, the same son that Abraham nearly sacrificed for his God before an angel interfered. Her biblical age of death was 127 years old, and when she is mentioned in the New Testament, it is to praise her steadfast faith and obedience to her husband. 

Consider Lot’s wife, unnamed for her sins. Lot was the nephew of Abraham who welcomed God’s angels into his home in Sodom after they were sent to destroy it. But when the men of the village surround the home in an attempt to assault the angels, Lot attempts to offer his virgin daughters to the townsmen instead, only for them to continue to revolt. So the angels force Lot, his wife, and their daughters away, telling them to leave Sodom without turning back. Sulfur and fire rain down as God renders the people and their plains entirely barren as punishment for their wickedness. But then Lot’s wife turns back, and as the story goes, becomes “a pillar of salt.” 

Why did she turn to face Sodom while fleeing? For the same reason Orpheus turned to face Eurydice: a lack of faith. Of course it is the wives in both stories who perish, banished from whence they came for someone’s sins, even if they were not their own.

*

“As a mother you learn what it is to be both martyr and devil,” Rachel Cusk writes in her 2001 motherhood memoir A Life’s Work. To be both is to be a walking contradiction, as most mothers are, especially those selfish enough to have needs of their own. A decade later, in the divorce memoir Aftermath, Cusk writes, 

“I read somewhere that a space station is always slowly falling back to earth, and that every few months or so a rocket has to be sent to push it back out again. In rather the same way, a woman is forever dragged at by an imperceptible force of biological conformism; her life is relentlessly iterative; it requires energy to keep her in orbit. Year after year she’ll do it, but if one year the rocket doesn’t come then down she’ll go.” 

It was Cusk I thought of as I read Emily Gould’s recent personal essay about her near-divorce. Like Gould’s essay, Cusk’s work was maligned for daring to cross the boundary between private and personal that so many women writers before them have also had to navigate. 

“In the summer of 2022,” the essay begins, “I lost my mind.” Gould recalls losing her apartment at the same time her husband was preparing to publish a book. She turns to drinking as her mental state deteriorates along with her marriage, entering a sort of mania as she becomes convinced she needs to leave her husband. She resents the success he’s earned as a writer as a result of her taking on the majority of the household labour, and she leans into erratic behaviour in search of the freedom that eludes her. 

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One day, he confronts her for her inattention, and she leaves, only to be told by multiple doctors that she needs to check herself into a psychiatric hospital immediately. So she enters an institution, but even after stabilizing she finds that she still wants to leave her husband. “I wondered if my marriage would always feel like a competition,” she writes, “and if the only way to call the competition a draw would be to end it.” 

She recalls a previous winter; her husband had been in Ukraine reporting on the start of the war, and in her anxiety she snuck out to borrow a cigarette from a neighbour. In retrospect, she senses that the first seeds of mania were sowed with that transgression: “Leaving the children, smoking the cigarette, resenting Keith for putting himself in harm’s way and going out into the greater world while I tended to lunches, homework, and laundry as though everything were normal.” 

Gould turns to literature for answers, combing through Heartburn and Aftermath (“the literary divorce bible”) for signs to confirm what she already believes to be true. “She makes the case for the untenability of her relationship by explaining that men and women are fundamentally unequal,” she writes of Cusk. “She posits that men and women who marry and have children are perpetually fighting separate battles, lost to each other.” 

Gould recalls how jarring it felt to read a description of her child’s birth from her husband’s point of view ahead of his novel’s publication. A fact-checker from The New Yorker calls to verify the details of an excerpt from his novel. “Had a geyser of blood shot out of my vagina? I didn’t actually know.” She mentions off-handedly, “In case you’re wondering, Keith has read this essay and suggested minimal changes.” She mentions the effort involved between married writers to “love each other despite the underlying thrum of competing ambitions.” 

Eventually, Gould and her husband seek to reconcile. She notes that while he would have to forgive her cheating and financial irresponsibility and “having a mental breakdown,” she would have to forgive his taking her for granted and “usurping the time and energy and brain space with which I might have written a better book than his.” 

“Could the therapist help us overcome what I knew to be true,” Gould writes, “that we’d gone into marriage already aware that we were destined for constant conflict just because of who we are?”

*

In the original version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” the Sea King’s youngest daughter wishes to become a human after catching her first glimpse of the world above. She falls in love with a prince from afar, and saves him when he nearly drowns. For the chance to be with him, she gives up her beautiful voice in exchange for human legs that will forever be in pain. Others warn her again and again about the price of becoming human just to win another’s love:

“But think again,” said the witch; “for when once your shape has become like a human being, you can no more be a mermaid. You will never return through the water to your sisters, or to your father’s palace again; and if you do not win the love of the prince, so that he is willing to forget his father and mother for your sake, and to love you with his whole soul, and allow the priest to join your hands that you may be man and wife, then you will never have an immortal soul. The first morning after he marries another your heart will break, and you will become foam on the crest of the waves.”

“I will do it,” says the little mermaid, resolute. 

But in a tragic misunderstanding caused in part by her muteness, the prince marries another woman instead. As the little mermaid is about to die, her sisters rescue her, having exchanged their hair for a dagger which, if used to kill the prince, will allow her to return to life in the sea. But sneaking into the prince’s room at night, she finds she cannot kill him. Instead, she flings the knife “far away from her into the waves; the water turned red where it fell, and the drops that sprouted up looked like blood.” She turns to cast one last look at him before throwing herself into the ocean, dissolving into a salty sea foam. 

*

In Julie Phillips’ The Baby on the Fire Escape, she writes of the poet Adrienne Rich, whose own frustration at the demands of artistic motherhood led her to feeling like “a monster–an anti-woman.”

But the ‘monster’ has since been reclaimed courtesy of Jenny Offill, who launched a decade’s worth of discourse in 2014 with Dept. of Speculation. In the autofiction-ish novel, Offill’s stand-in writes that she wants to become an art monster, the kind of woman that concerns herself with art above all else. In contrast to Robert Nozick’s conception of the utility monster, the art monster converts feminine greed and maternal neglect into creative output. 

In a recent interview in Dirt, writer Kate Zambreno rejects the art monster cliché, a preoccupation belonging only to “white rich women…the brownstone leisured class.” Still, an entire school of classification has sprung from the discourse, with Lauren Elkin recently publishing an ode to art monsters such as Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta, and Audre Lorde. Defined as art that is “at once highly personal and political,” monstrous art is, per The New Yorker, “rooted in experiences of the body and a determination to break down binaries.” 

In the Dirt interview, Zambreno mentions that her husband has edited her work throughout the course of their 20-year relationship, despite a “terrible bedside manner when he’s editing.” She suggests that this may have contributed to her Zelda Fitzgerald obsession, hinting at a tendency for “genius” husbands to edit and steal the words of their wives.

“I was really enraptured and destroyed by this idea of this editor-write relationship that was so gendered,” Zambreno notes before mentioning that she doesn’t show her husband everything, at least not anymore. “I keep it really private now…the writing space, the notebook space is my privacy. And it always has been.”

*

In A Life of One’s Own, Joanna Biggs explores the lives of nine women writers through the lens of her own painful divorce. From Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante, Biggs reflects on what it means to create a life of freedom through art:

“I had so many questions: could you be a feminist and be in love? Did the search for independence mean I would never be at home with anyone, anywhere? Was domesticity a trap? What was worth living for if you lost faith in the traditional goals of a woman's life? What was worth living for at all–what degree of unhappiness, lostness, chaos was bearable?”

Perhaps every generation of women faces this quandary, wondering how to navigate the personal in the political. 

“Perhaps this is what neuroscientists are getting at when they refer to the flow state, which happens when you're deeply absorbed in doing something…but often making art,” Biggs writes,“Perhaps it is about going mad.” Biggs argues that fiction allows women to cross the boundaries they’d otherwise abandoned in favour of becoming wives and mothers.

“A man has been termed a microcosm,” Biggs quotes Mary Wollstonecraft, “and every family might also be called a state.” Wollstonecraft died five years after the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, when her daughter Mary was only eleven days old. Wollstonecraft was 38. 

In living with her deceased mother’s name and the feminist legacy it carried, the younger Mary walked the line between death and resurrection long before she came to prominence for writing Frankenstein. When she eventually married the poet Percy Shelley, she was so traumatized by her encounters with motherhood and loss that she refused to name her most iconic creation:

“This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good,” Shelley remarked…She herself had no name of her own. Like the creature pieced together from cadavers collected by Victor Frankenstein, her name was an assemblage of parts: the name of her mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, stitched to that of her father, the philosopher William Godwin, grafted onto that of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, as if Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley were the sum of her relations, bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, if not the milk of her mother’s milk, since her mother had died eleven days after giving birth to her, mainly too sick to give suck.” 

*

In The Cut, Rebecca Traister asks why everyone is suddenly so eager for marriage to make a comeback. “It’s not just the think-tank-economist-columnist class prescribing the marriage cure,” Traister writes, “It’s also hard-right commentators and politicians pushing policies aimed to re-center (hetero) marriage as the organizing- principle of American family life by reversing the progress — from legal abortion to affirmative action to no-fault divorce — that has enabled women to have economic and social stability independent of marriage.”

Of course, this isn’t new. Traiser argues, “Over centuries, everyone from clergy to presidents has surveyed the challenges facing this country — income inequality, housing shortages, struggling children, chronic unhappiness — and presented marriage as a panacea, one that has conveniently contained women and conferred additional benefits on men.”

Is it any wonder that the artist wives of today find themselves in revolt?

“My husband asked me not to write about him after we split up,” Róisín Lanigan writes in The Fence. “We were still together then, me and my husband. ‘Oh my god, I obviously won’t.’ I said. ‘We won’t split up anyway. Shut up, that’s so stupid.’ Later I think about how this is also a weird thing for him to have asked me because he of all people knows I make promises I don’t keep.”

*

In a recent interview, literary critic Merve Emre argues that “good autofiction isn’t just transcribing the life that you have. Good autofiction is realizing you can be a character in your own life…by writing about yourself as a character.”

“Do we have to fictionalize everything?” the interviewer, Sara Fredman, asks in response. “Fictionalizing is one approach,” Emre argues, while the other is “just relentless sublimation. You don’t have to write an essay about your marriage and your divorce. You can just write a piece of criticism…and you can betray so much about yourself and still not be exposing or betraying others.”

Emre points to Elizabeth Hardwick, who uses “criticism as a form of sublimation” to reveal bits of her life. Yet just a moment later, Emre also mentions an evening in which she was taking a meeting at home when her husband walked in, “just babbling about something or another, and my editor was like, ‘can’t you just push him out of a window already?’“ 

It’s a remarkably undercut moment from a known-image architect such as Emre. She allows herself to become an imperfect character in her own life, building on her self-image as a work-obsessed wife that occasionally forgets her own husband’s name. And in case you were wondering, of course she has her own snark page. Then again, maybe all adventurous women do.

*

As with all personal essays that go viral, the reaction to it has eclipsed its actual substance. It’s a typical cycle: in 1983, Nora Ephron publishes an account of her husband’s affairs in Heartburn, only to be lambasted for crossing the boundary of the personal into the public through her art. In 2019, CJ Hauser writes The Crane Wife about rejecting the trappings of domesticity, only for another writer to argue that Hauser was being reductive about marriage as a whole. In 2022, Isabel Kaplan writes about identifying with Nora Ephron, only for another writer to respond with charges of gender essentialism.

In a 2020 essay for The New Inquiry, Jamie Hood writes, “I wonder both if there is an intelligible ontological status to the kind of wifedom I’m imagining and also if it is even possible for the subject who is entirely attendant to the subjectivities of others (wife as inextricable from her husband’s discrete personhood, mother as inextricable from the needs of her children) to be, finally, considered a subject in some deeper metaphysical sense.
” Hood asks if heterosexual desire “can only and ever be a dead remnant of a racist and misogynist structuration of desire within a system built on commodity fetishism.”

And yet.

“I can’t help myself,” Hood writes, “I want to be undone by love.” 

*

In a new essay, “Housewife Demonology,” Hood writes that she no longer wishes to be a housewife, musing instead that “any garden looks like Eden if you’re barred from entry.” As she argues, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was about the writer’s “sense that the woman who loves men must make of these men gods. It is by such worship she’s able to concede to, rather than be destroyed by, a social order in which she is ‘condemned to dependence.’”

And yet we’ve been taught to keep silent about going mad, and about the “structural indoctrination” that supersedes our self-esteem and feminist instincts. In fact, “if the Twitter threads and think pieces are to be believed, any humiliation we experience at the hands of men only ever results in a revelation of our own responsibility for this degradation,” Hood argues.

“In the literary world, a turning of the tides against the personal essay and memoir genres over the last few years has also meant that, should we dare to speak or write about these humiliations, we’ve failed to “get over” them appropriately, or we’ve un-self-critically been co-opted by the Trauma Industrial Complex. The bootstrap mentality of such arguments adores silence. Then, every third hour, we must supplicate ourselves before another recapitulation of the viral post: “Are straight women ok?””

But Hood refuses to take a cynical outlook: “Why shouldn’t we want every pleasure? Why shouldn’t we dream a sea change?”

And so a woman turns to salt.

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I had a great chat with end of the world magazine, which you can now watch on YouTube. We talked about grief, love, writing as an archive, “selling” oneself as a writer online, and my preoccupation with the topics that eventually became the Intellectual as Influencer piece. Thanks for being such an inquisitive and thoughtful host!

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On My Reading List This Weekend

• “Death to captchas”: in proving our humanity, we’re giving machines further insight into our own thinking (MIT Technology Review)

• The underage workers training AI (Wired)

• The socially-conscious mean girl (Words from Eliza)

• The literacy crisis among college students (Slate)

• The immoral disappearance of Coyote vs Acme (LaineyGossip)

• After breakups, the brokenhearted are creating AI clones of their exes (Futurism)

• Meet the chatbot that acts like a social media obsessed teen (The Daily Beast)

• Jia Tolentino on writing as “cathartic depletion” (Calendance)

• Paloma Elsesser on the price of being first (The Cut)

• “A community predicated on the pursuit of pleasure is more an archipelago of self-contained islands than it is a home” (Communion)

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The Sunday Letter #50

A formerly-incarcerated victim of abuse getting the meme treatment. A YouTuber having to clarify that she will (probably) not be giving birth to a reincarnated King Charles. Antonio Banderas’ stepdaughter saying the words, “It holds almost an entire bottle of Josh!” as she pours ironic wine into a lead-filled Stanley Cup. “It-Girl-Wife” Sofia (daughter of Lionel) Richie and her $27M backyard gender reveal: “She has all the money in the world & still chose intimate simplicity,” gushes one top-comment. Trad-wife discourse getting thrown out as soon as the JetBlue heiress/mom of 8 joins a beauty pageant. Animals going extinct. Marina Abramović’s skincare line. Today’s teens getting anxious about the future and living under an anti-vape surveillance state. The Mystery Van mandela effect. Swifties arguing that a blonde billionaire is the only woman who can save us from AI, Trump, and the existence of winter. Twenty-year olds going to bed instead of going out with friends. A TikTok video about Apple Vision Pro where one user comments, “dark times are coming,” to which another user replies, “turn on the screen, dude 🤝.” AI celebrities scamming people with Le Creuset sets. My husband asking me, “Did you hear cold medicine doesn’t actually work?”

I write down “welcome to the age of collective dissociation,” and I don’t open the draft again for weeks. 

*

Lately the world feels like it’s been turned into one giant meme. But as the hosts of Binchtopia argue in a recent episode, our dwindling attention spans depend on it. All bets are off; everything from celebrity death announcements to dating profiles to private photos are fodder for public consumption when it comes to the Online Sphere.

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Virality is enthralling, offering a way to communicate with a massive amount of people all at once, even if just for a moment. As a result, the Binchtopia hosts argue, the internet has become its own mass-communication ecosystem which must consume and manipulate in order to spread, reshaping our identities to fit into it. So we narrow ourselves down, painting ourselves as tomato girls or clean girls or mob wives in order to cast our own realities into easily digestible bite-sized morsels.

The punitive industrial complex which imprisoned Gypsy-Rose, and the viral industrial complex which made her an internet star are similar institutions. Both rely on the public to crystallize a wrongdoer’s worst moment into a fixed identity with no wiggle room or nuance allowed. As one Binchtopia host remarks sardonically, “One must imagine Gypsy Rose happy.”

*

As virality must continuously reproduce itself, so too must AI. A few years ago, an animated AI Seinfeld began airing on Twitch. Apart from an infamous transphobic hiccup, the show is meant to self-generate endlessly, not unlike a roomful of monkeys and typewriters that may occasionally stumble upon a joke. The end goal of such a program can’t be described as anything but virus-like: it aims to consume the original entity and make it ‘conscious,’ capable of self-improvement but eternally trapped in the parameters of a show-about-nothing. Does AI Jerry (now called “Larry”) yearn? Can he evolve, or will he only ever devolve into the worst iteration of himself? 

*

Likewise, what happens when the improvements in our technology allow us to retreat further from ourselves and from each other? I’ve written previously about how the retreat into girlhood reinforces a retreat away from interpersonal responsibilities, and ’s recent YouTube video about third spaces expanded my thinking even further (highly recommend).

Arguing that wealth permits a retreat deeper and deeper into solitude, Le suggests that wealth causes people to turn their focus away from their communities. Plus, as argues, we’re spending more and more on delivery while at the same time spending more time alone, in the company of only our phones and computers, where we don’t have to consider the cost of the exploitation built in to make it all feel so convenient.

As a result, the Online Sphere is one of the only remaining third spaces where folks can gather and live out their fantasies, which also means having a direct say in the outcomes. And as @PrettyCritical on TikTok argues, by treating celebrities and influencers as online avatars, audiences are able to live vicariously through people outside of their own orbit. The flipside is that they lose respect for the humans underneath the online avatar in the process, commanding them to behave how we want—or else. We expect that by bestowing our attention on someone, it earns us their servitude and gratitude.

Ten years ago, Monica Lewinsky wrote in Vanity Fair,

“Yes, we’re all connected now… But we’re also caught in a feedback loop of defame and shame, one in which we have become both perps and victims… The ease, the speed, and the distance that our electronic devices afford us can also make us colder, more glib, and less concerned about the consequences of our pranks and prejudice. Having lived humiliation in the most intimate possible way, I marvel at how willingly we have all signed on to this new way of being… It may surprise you to learn that I’m actually a person.”

*

Perhaps what’s really missing from being in the Online Sphere is the feeling of anonymity. Consider 4chan and the early internet message boards, which offered the chance to scream into the void without consequence. 4chan, toxic as it is, doesn’t use metrics, and there is no central ‘profile’ through which one may follow or befriend other users. The result is an endless consciousness reflecting back at itself for infinity without the influence of ads or content creators.

Over on Twitter, it’s getting harder to tell what’s real and what’s not—not because everyone’s anonymous, but because everyone’s a bot, engineered to pass tweets back and forth until they become viral and Twitter looks like less of a ghost-town. Would it even be possible to replicate the 4chan-style anonymity elsewhere, or do TikTok exceptions like 2girls1bottl3 prove the rule? Between 4chan and Twitter, which model might be the model of the future: the one that forgoes content farming, or the one relying on AI and bots to stay afloat?

*

Lately, when I message friends on Instagram I get a prompt trying to complete my sentences, leading me to wonder how much Meta already knows about my speech patterns and texting habits—more than I do, probably.

When I visited my friend recently they mentioned that Apple’s new Journal app had encouraged them to start writing again for the first time in years. Apple’s Health app was also recently updated, now allowing users to track their emotions and mental well-being on a daily basis. 

One user calls the Journal app “my therapist on the go,” but would a therapist be able to pinpoint any day in your life and give you a dashboard of what you were listening to, thinking, feeling, seeing, and doing at any given moment?

“What is something important about yourself that hardly anyone ever knows?” the Journal app prompts, “Record an audio memo to future you. What about this time in your current life do you want to capture?” 

It wasn’t long before my friend started to feel like they were uploading their diary into the Cloud everyday so that Apple could specifically tailor their user experience to their every whim, like that episode of Black Mirror where a woman gets trapped in her own home operating system. 

“But still,” my friend remarked, “it was nice to feel so taken care of.” 

*

Two years ago, a major telecom outage in Canada caused millions of people to lose access to the internet, phone calls, and Interac (the network that allows us to use credit and debit cards). My friend told me that when it happened, they didn’t have any cash on hand at their acreage, so they went two days unable to make any purchases even as their pet food reserves began to run low. The experience made them want to seek out disaster-preparedness communities online.

The human urge to prepare for complete and utter catastrophe is also the human urge to seek consolation in community.

*

My friend and I were chatting about how social media feels like a pressure cooker these days. I mentioned that I’d been seeing more tweets than usual encouraging me to prepare for a civil war-type event. “Oh yeah, WarTok,” they said, matter-of-factly. I hadn’t heard of that corner of TikTok, but the next day a video about ‘realistic disaster prep’ came across my feed. The creator lists 100 items that disappear first during war: Generators, firewood, sugar, garbage bags, duct tape, bleach, chocolate, popcorn, tea, survival guide books. I had flashbacks to the early days of Covid-19 when I ran to the corner store for tampons only to find that all the toilet paper was gone. 

No wonder dissociation becomes preferable. Consider the man who made a big fuss about never wanting to learn the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, only to appear on a radio show two weeks later to hear the answer live on air. Or the 27-year old woman who’s spent the last ten months avoiding Eras Tour spoilers. There’s just something so human about the tendency to define ourselves so narrowly that we will go so far as to do so through negation: I am this because I am not that.

*

As I write this letter, I’m watching the Super Bowl in the background and half-listening as my husband tries to explain the rules of football to me. A tourism ad for the province of Ontario keeps playing, and I hear them tout a clean nuclear energy initiative. I recall a seminar from many years ago in which I learned about the plans for longterm nuclear waste messages, intended to warn humans away from waste sites at least 10,000 years from now.

Based on the assumption that “today’s written languages are unlikely to survive,” the project of adequately conveying the dangers of nuclear waste sites is complicated by the eventual obsolescence of the methods we may use to convey it. Specifically, a 1993 report determined that any ‘warning signs’ surrounding waste sites had to be able to universally communicate the following:

“This place is a message…and part of a system of messages…pay attention to it!”

“Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.”

“This place is not a place of honour…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here…nothing valued is here.”

“What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.”

“The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.”

*

I’ve often been interested in how the future can speak for the past, but can the past also speak into the future?

In a 2019 article about the death of an Icelandic glacier, writer Lacy M. Johnson describes a funeral scene in which a politician reads a memorial plaque:

“A letter to the future…Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”

*

Consider this tweet about the six-layers of a 30 Rock joke involving a Slingblade reference. While Slingblade jokes probably won’t register among younger audiences anymore, the general structure of the joke still holds as long as the five other layers of meaning stay true. It’s this funny little talent we humans have for imbuing meaning into the nothingness, for speaking words into a future void.

“Record an audio memo to future you. What about this time in your current life do you want to capture?”

Can the past speak into the future?

Only you will know if we did it.

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On the Menu

• The Rise of the Intellectual as Influencer

• BeSoooooForReal

• TikTok Search and the Rise of Ragebait Algorithms

• Taylor Swift, Hair Messer-Upper

• The Tortured Billionaires Club

• The Girls Are Romanticizing the Library Again <3

• A Swing and a Miss for Nepo Babies

• On My Reading List This Weekend

The Rise of the Intellectual as Influencer

A few days ago, a young writer in Toronto named Emma interviewed me for an upcoming issue of end of the world magazine. [Update: you can now watch the interview here!] We talked about developing a creative process, the future of online writing, and that particularly nebulous pressure on writers to ‘sell’ themselves online. Afterwards, I was left wondering about the rise of the intellectual as influencer, and my anxieties around both labels.

Rebecca Jennings has written about this phenomenon at Vox, with a recent piece about how everyone’s a sellout now and another about the pressure on culture writers to chase the trendbait beat. “Journalists on the culture beat are essentially captive to whatever happens to be trending online,” Jennings writes, “in the hopes they might capitalize on its existing vitality.”

An entire creative class is exhausting itself chasing lightning in a bottle, and this pressure is only mounting. The moralization around the term ‘sellout,’ however, has others arguing that the pressure to “sell” one’s self as an artist is nothing new. Cece Xie writes, “All of these double standards and social media savvy and performative packaging of art…preceded the rise of personal branding,” noting that “for POC, there was never a time when simply being an Artist was good enough.”

*

I wrote in my ArticleTok piece that by “Offering a bite-sized way to quickly engage with new viewers,” ArticleTok allows creators to signal both aesthetic and curatorial taste quickly and with less effort required than reading full books. Since then, I heard from numerous friends who said that their own feeds have been full of the same curated article round-ups, and they were feeling panicked about it:

To be honest, that same panic is what prompted me to write the piece in the first place. I had found myself compromising my writing time in favour of compiling a massive amount of tabs on my browser, which filled with me dread as they sat unread. Then I’d see others in my feed somehow making the same round-ups so quickly (though whether they were actually reading the articles or just having AI summarize them was debatable). And it’s clear why ArticleTok has taken off so quickly: one viral TikTok video can lead to thousands of new eyeballs on Substack, as was the case for me.

With the death of so many legacy media companies where young writers would typically cut their teeth working with editors on deadlines, the writers of tomorrow are getting their starts on TikTok and Substack instead. Now, influencer/ectuals represent a new kind of micro-celebrity. The tightening gap between writer and consumer in which growth is correlated to parasocial attachment may feel antithetical to the project of art-making itself, but it’s likely the future of it too. Influencers already exist outside of time, with access to an entire market of free goods and services that aren’t yet available to the wider public. The result is an anxious need for speed, in which one must not only have the most original, correct take on the prevalent discourse, but they must also be the first to share it.

The inimitable Cydney Hayes has already written plenty about this, specifically how “Every tech company starts out saying our product will change the world, and we’ve seen again and again how they turn artists into content creators and end up as screaming content farms where un-nuanced, easily digestible content dominates and corporate interests profit.” One must be both an island and a celebrity, both for themselves and for their art. But what happens when it’s also for the sake of the algorithm?

With Google introducing its new AI writing assistant, it’s worth asking ourselves whether there will even be a use for humans on the internet in the near future. Soon, we’ll all have the option of having AI write our emails, resumes, and social media comments. Or for some writers, even their Substack posts.

“The experiences of searching, reading, shopping, and wandering on the web have depended on varying extents on the presence of text and media that other users have contributed, often for free and under the auspices of participation in human-centered systems,” Intelligencer writes.

With AI amalgamating all human-effort into its own language, who would want to contribute to it? Who would want to read it? Or, as Intelligencer asks, “What happens when the text boxes can fill themselves?”

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BeSoooooForReal

BeReal, which once promised its users an ‘authentic,’ anti-Instagram experience, has lost its buzz over the years, and in response, the app recently announced new ‘RealPeople’ and ‘RealBrands’ feeds for celebrity/influencer content.

Let me just say, there is simply no way any celebrity has access to a public BeReal account on their own personal phones, let alone Joe Jonas. It’s more than likely that publicists and social media managers are carefully curating a series of fun ‘moments’ for the site to drop at random times throughout the day. Does that negate the ‘authenticity’ of the app, or can we acknowledge that it was never really as altruistic as it painted itself to be?

The app continues to inch towards being just another Instagram-alternative, slowly branching out into allowing users to tag others and see photos from friends-of-friends, even releasing its own direct-messaging function. Before long, I’m sure TikTok and BeReal will release their own apps just for direct messaging, not unlike Facebook’s Messenger app. But will we even have anything left to say to each other?

TikTok Search and the Rise of Ragebait Algorithms

The other day TikTok prompted me to add its Search feature to my home screen as a shortcut. Given that Google is nearing obsoletion as it edges closer to just being another AI generator, it makes sense that TikTok would make another play for its throne as the leading search engine. Obviously this is worrisome, though, given how TikTok’s own search function is also algorithm-based. Viral engagement on TikTok depends on SEO, meaning that a video will be more successful if it prompts users to type something into the search bar immediately after watching it.

But the SEO strategy has slippery ramifications. I’ve noticed that viral videos will often have completely unrelated search prompts listed at the bottom, prompting users to click out of curiosity. For example, have you heard of Cat Janice? She’s an artist on TikTok who’s gone viral after asking users to stream her song, the proceeds of which will go to her son after she passes from her terminal cancer diagnosis. For some reason, every time one of her videos comes across my page, the search prompt at the bottom of the screen is “Cat Janice faking cancer.” It’s an eye-catching search prompt, one which I couldn’t help but click, only to realize there weren’t any actual results for it. It was just a ragebaity prompt which did its job properly: it got me to stay on the app, even for just a minute longer.

It’s not unlike how Instagram has started showing Threads (Meta’s forgettable Twitter-knockoff) within its feed, so you could be scrolling through a friends’ baby shower pictures when suddenly you’re confronted with the worst tweet you’ve ever seen, and you have to click on it to see if anyone told this person off, and suddenly you’re in yet another terrible app, following the ragebait wherever it takes you. Speaking of…

Taylor Swift, Hair Messer-Upper

On Sunday night Taylor Swift made history as the first artist to ever win four Grammy’s for Album of the Year. Swift also solidified herself as a woman who tousles the hair of her married friends. Not to #discourse but it must be bizarre to be in the orbit of someone so rich that she can just command everyone around her to behave exactly the way she wants. It’s funny, whenever those purple filter shots start to trickle out after one of her parties, I wonder why there aren’t any videos. And now we know it’s because they would all have this energy (as in, let’s-take-photos-to-prove-how-much-fun-we’re-having, rather than just, you know, having fun…).

The Tortured Billionaires Club

The only thing I have to add to the discourse about Taylor Swift’s newest millennial-coded album title is that she is very clearly longing to have the depth of lyricists like her friends Florence Welch, Phoebe Bridgers, or Lana Del Rey, but she just can’t break out of the confines of her own persona. Also, everyone’s clowning on the tortured-title and the mans who inspired it, but I will just say, when I was in university, the polisci bros had a group chat called “The Brhode’s Scholars” and they all still got laid, so.

And while the world holds its breath over whether Swift will attend the Super Bowl this weekend, some fans are struggling to defend the billionaire’s private jet usage, even when it’s in the name of blonde love. As fans wait impatiently for Swift to announce her newest re-recording so they can give her more money, I’ve seen some fans on TikTok argue that her recent overexposure and ensuing backlash has been purposefully orchestrated as an homage to her Reputation era, which is a generous way of saying that even the Swifties think it’s all been a little bit much lately. There could be upwards of three more Swift albums out in the world before the end of the Eras Tour in November, and who knows how old we’ll be by then. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find out we’ve been on the beach that makes you old all along.

The Girls Are Romanticizing the Library Again <3

A Swing and a Miss for Nepo Babies

Though Dakota Johnson usually finds herself in the unintentional Mother Zone of celebrity worship, she recently revealed that maybe she’s not as ironically disaffected as she seemed—in fact, she’s not really in on the joke at all. A disappointing turn for the woman known for defeating Ellen Degeneres and limes.

On My Reading List This Weekend

• The Case for Guerrilla Crosswalks (Bloomberg)

• Jean Cocteau on poetry (The Paris Review)

• “Preiss recalls a conversation she had with [Emma] Roberts, her best friend since they were teenagers, and the writer Ariel Levy. “Emma said, ‘I want to do for books what Kylie Jenner did for lip kits.’ Ariel was like, ‘What does that mean?’ And Emma said, ‘Well, that you have to have one.’” (archived NYT)

• Exhausted by aesthetic culture (Refinery29)

• So many of my writer crushes tackling the age-old question, “Is it better to desire or be desired?” Personally I’m a Magdalene J. Taylor myself. (Dirt)

• An addendum for the myopia of youth piece I wrote a few weeks back: a girl-net deep dive from Lux. The piece is paywalled, but well-worth it: “Being a girl online extends the performative demands of girlhood into these for-profit platforms and mines them for ways to sell it all back to us. You have the work of being a girl and then the work of being a girl online.”

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