Bonjour mes amis,
I’m back in Paris again, ready to dive into my own hot vaxx summer. This will mostly consist of breaking out my flowy linen trousers and maybe having a glass of rosé on a terrasse once or twice a week rather than the all-out three-month-long Roman orgy kicking off for the under-forty set. And I’m fine with that, mostly, because even under normal circumstances I’d probably want a whole suite of jabs before I’d consider going to a crowded nightclub full of sweaty, heaving bodies. Anyway.
Since relentless iteration is pretty much the name of the game for me, I’m coming at you this Sunday with a new ting. Well, not new-new, exactly. Awhile back, I introduced and then summarily abandoned the link round-up aspect of this letter that I'd christened as "Appetites." After my first few rounds, I felt the letter was becoming way too dense, and thus at risk of losing your attention. And frankly, it was just A LOT to come up with an essay and a big set of thematic links every week. I’m balancing a bunch of writing projects these days, which is a dream come true, but I have to be realistic about my bandwidth. Think of it as quality control.
Still, I’ve missed the fun of pulling together some bits and bobs from around the internet. So, a compromise: I’m going to alternate between essay letters one week, and round-up letters the other. It gives us both a little breathing space.
Since there are plenty of other newsletters that are great sources for curating the best o’the week reads, I’m not going to be too focused on timeliness. My selections are really meant to be an expression of my shifting appetites: the things I crave, the things I’m curious about, the things I’m inspired by, and the things I can’t get enough of. Because a girl’s gotta eat. Care to join me at the table?
Hunger
The second season of Ted Lasso lands later this month, and as a recent convert, I am thrilled to invite more of Ted’s brand of optimism into my life. Another one of my favorite recent discoveries has been the Youtube channel The Take, which produces short and sharp video essays on pop cultural tropes. Their recent episode on “The Rise of Relentless Optimism” astutely observes that Ted’s positive outlook “is a choice, and a discipline that he practices.”
Thirst
I fully watched the entirety of the rather sad-sack live broadcast of the BAFTA Television awards in hopes that Paul Mescal would win the Best Actor category for his stunning performance in Normal People, which I am still unabashedly obsessed with. The two-ish hours of my life I sacrificed to enduring Richard Ayoade’s tedious snark were well worth it for Mescal’s heartfelt and slightly awkward acceptance speech and post-show interview. What an absolute bastard.
Life
You didn’t know you needed The Philosophy of Elliott Gould, but I’m here to tell you that you do.
Knowledge
As I’ve begun writing and researching for my project about midife and adolescence, I’ve realized that coming of age in the early nineties gave me a kind of feminist blindspot. Because this feels like a central strand in my narrative, I’m re-reading The Feminine Mystique to see if I might re-capture some of my headspace from when I first encountered Friedan’s seminal book in my junior year of high school. It occurred to me that feminism itself was in an in-between space at the same time as I was, transitioning from the second wave to the third, which led to a real sea change in messaging. How did that gap influence my own identity as a feminist?
Destruction
Speaking of feminism, perhaps some of you read author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s open letter in response to two former students who publicly accused her of being transphobic. (The letter has since been taken down from her website.) I did, and I had an opinion, one that was quite conflicted. On one hand, I felt that she’d made some good points about the sanctimony and righteousness of callout culture in general, but I also felt that individuals should have the ability to choose how they identify themselves, and it’s not really my place or hers to make any kind of remark on the matter. I’m still sitting with the nuances of my own perspective, and I’m not looking for any external validation or rejection of it. But this piece by Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler feels like a very measured consideration worthy of attentive reading. Nevertheless, to quote one of the best parts of Bo Burnham’s Inside: “Is it necessary that every single person on this planet um, expresses every single opinion that they have on every single thing that occurs all at the same time? Is that… is that necessary?”
Insatiable
A beautiful interactive ‘Close Read’ of my favorite poem, ‘One Art’, by Elizabeth Bishop. This stanza, in particular, has inspired me immeasurably:
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
And as a bonus, since we’re talking villanelles, here is the inimitable Michael Sheen reading Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’