197. READ. LOOK. THINK.
Nancy Meyers' kitchen playlist, main character syndrome, AUNTWAVE, Am I a lesbian_pdf, mask-fishing, a wasteland of ads for the middle-aged.
Another winter survived!
Hi,
I’m trying to think of a new way to do my newsletter. I started it ten years ago and calling it READ.LOOK.THINK. seemed fine then; now too many people have called their newsletters something like it, and I feel more conflicted about giving reccs (slightly bullying?), even though I live for the reccs of others. Plus I am forty. I’ll just have to have a think. If you know anyone doing a good “what I’m reading” newsletter with links can you reply it to me?
READ.
‘That was a bad summer to be one of my dads. You had to really watch your back.’
I’m in the middle of a hundred books, all really good: Ella Baxter’s New Animal; Jacqueline Maley’s The Truth About Her; Charlotte Mendelson’s The Exhibitionist; Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach (lol! but for real, it’s… an eye-opener).
LOOK.
Anaïs Nin’s LA house (and black-bottomed pool).
AUNTWAVE ‘strikes a compromise between domestic utility and pure, whim-chasing decorativeness’.
Helen Garner on a podcast #Helen.
This is a UK-specific recc but a good one: these sketch books bought in bulk from a kids’ craft shop!
TONTYCORE the sound of New Labour 1990-2000:
In Nancy Meyers’ Kitchen playlist:
1950s Penguin bookcase:
I love Zara Wong’s Substack. Food: @mungbeans_. House: @townley_terrace.
We’ve been watching ‘DNA’ on BBC iPlayer, very classy Nordic crime drama with very classy Charlotte Rampling. Now we will trying ‘Wisting’ — it’s very hard to be me (a crime lover) because some crimes scare me too much and in others the TV writing is too dumb. Pray 4 me.
THINK.
Why people are acting so weird.
‘Don't forget that if the 3 of you are with your father in the photo, it meant that I was behind the camera!’
Longitudinal analyses of 17,409 participants (10–21 years old) suggest distinct developmental windows of sensitivity to social media in adolescence, when higher estimated social media use predicts a decrease in life satisfaction ratings. For boys it’s 14–15 and 19 years old, and girls 11–13 and 19 years old.
That girl vs feral girl.
The ‘rampant and unexamined fatphobia’ of Boomers.
‘Trolls like trolling, whereas most people don’t like being trolled. So trolls are attracted to internet forums such as Twitter, where they can get their toxic jollies without much threat of being beaten up, while moral people exit—all increasing the troll-to-normal ratio over time. If you feel as though your relationship with social media has gotten worse over time, this might explain why.’
‘I am writing this because I want to tell other cis women in the same position that we may be scared, but now we — some of us — are making the trans community scared.’
‘The feminine urge to write lengthy captions that anticipate the criticisms and concerns of every possible audience segment? Couldn’t be the Gen Z moms of TikTok.’
“Instagram will (has!) become a wasteland of ads for the middle-aged and bots, the way Facebook went maybe seven or eight years ago”.
That funny feeling.
Changing from fossil fuels to renewables feels ‘economically terrifying’, but the price trajectories of fossil fuels and renewables are already crossing. Renewable energy is ‘now cheaper than fossil fuel, and becoming more so.’ A ‘decisive transition’ would save the world twenty-six trillion dollars in energy costs in the coming decades.
⚠️ Britain’s net zero skeptics reach for the Brexit playbook. ⚠️
MY BOOK.
It might be time for me to stop turbo-showing off about A Great Hope (though please don’t stop sending me your feedback about it, I love it even more than you can possibly realise!!). Even so, I want to share this IG review from Ella Risbridger because it made me so happy.
I am so full of feelings about this beautiful, beautiful novel... I took a while to start it, because— Australian politics? But it's not really about that. It's about love and people and family... I never imagine books in my head, that's not how I read— and yet I see everything in this novel so clearly like it's the absolute truth. I lived in it. I loved it.
Then she described it to a friend as (I don’t need to check the IG for this, I have memorised it) ‘a woman-centric The Line of Beauty except funnier and Australian.’
Thank you to every single person who has bought, borrowed, shared or recced A Great Hope!
Jess
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