I’m sad/happy to tell you that it is June 11 and we are officially mere hours away from the start of the World Cup—shoutout to Mexico and South Africa for kicking us off. Indeed, if FIFA weren’t one of the most corrupt organizations in the world, I would omit the “sad” from the previous sentence, because unfortunately, the summer of football that takes place every four years remains one of my favorite events. I enjoy it more than the Olympics, more than my own birthday, more than Christmas, more than that period of summer when every year we all silently agree to avoid labor for several weeks.

But that little Zurich-headquartered self-governing and self-regulating body run by literal clown Gianni Infantino insists on rendering me and millions2 of others fools. Embarrassing. Nevertheless, we persist. We probably shouldn’t, like there comes a point when persistence is both futile and a mistake, but here we are. Persisting anyway. Like idiots.

The 2006 World Cup is the first one I really remember watching; we were visiting Uruguay for the summer and watched most matches from my grandparents’ living room. Uruguay hadn’t qualified but Italy, where we’d lived a few years prior, had, which meant that we watched the final with bated breath, trying not to cheer too loudly so as not to antagonize my grandfather, who’d attended French school his whole life and was the kind of francophile that would3 drive adult Clara up the wall.4

For 20 years, then, I’ve been pausing my life for four-six weeks every four years; for at least half of that time, I’ve been doing so begrudgingly and guiltily, knowing that anything that monetarily benefits FIFA should not receive this much of my attention. I mean:

And that doesn’t take into account the long list of issues bedeviling the current iteration of the Cup, such as:

• Gianni Infantino: Fifa president accused of breaking rules after giving Donald Trump peace prize - BBC Sport

• Infantino’s Yearslong Effort to Woo Trump for the World Cup - The New York Times5

• World Cup 2026 visa chaos: from referee Omar Artan to Iranian officials – who is affected? | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian

• 2026 World Cup tickets: FIFA confirms use of dynamic pricing - ESPN

If you want to read a comprehensive survey of 2026 World Cup controversies, our beloved Wikipedia does have you covered.

Then there’s also the fact that since at least 2014, I’ve marveled (derogatory) at Alexi Lalas’ ability to delude Americans into thinking he’s at all qualified to comment on and analyze football. His whole career is an ode to mediocrity and it made me angry even before I learned that he searched for his own name on twitter.

But. But but but. I love to stay up late and wake up at ungodly hours to watch teams I know next to nothing about play each other. Like, June 23, Jordan v. Algeria, 11pm EST? I will be there. I will, for the duration of the tournament, become the biggest fan of players and coaches I haven’t even heard of yet. I just know there’s a young breakout star from a country I’ve never once had even a passing thought about just waiting for my five-week unconditional support. And I’m ready! Maybe I’ll become an expert on Uzbek football. We don’t know! The summer’s just getting started!

All this and I haven’t even mentioned Uruguay; long-time readers will know it’s where I’m from, and football fans will know it’s our fifth straight time heading to the World Cup. I’m not making any predictions, because it’s pointless and because it really is an honor just to be nominated (see: qualify) but there are unfortunately few things as stupidly pride-inducing as being from a small country and watching your team perform on a global stage. It’s why people root for underdogs. It’s why we were excited when Morocco beat Spain and Portugal in the knockout rounds to reach the semis in 2022 (more on Morocco below).

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Anyway. Once again it will be a fraught time, balancing the joys of the tournament with the trials and tribulations caused by FIFA and the American government. You’ll find me here writing about it, surely.

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As a reminder, due to the 48 countries participating (as opposed to the usual 32) there are 12 groups this time around as opposed to the usual 8.

Here are a few groups I’ll be paying particular attention to:

Group C

Brazil

Morocco

Haiti

Scotland

Brazil is certainly the most likely to emerge as leader of Group C, but I’m curious to see how Morocco plays after the nightmare that was the Afcon final. The whole world seemed to be rooting for Morocco when they reached the World Cup semis back in 2022, and for a while it looked like they’d enjoy that support again in 2026, but few people were pleased with how Senegal’s victory was bureaucratically—and, if I may, nonsensically—snatched away months following the Africa Cup of Nations final match. A mess. Lastly: I feel like Haiti got the short end of the stick with this group.

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Group H

Spain

Cape Verde

Saudi Arabia

Uruguay

Hopefully self-explanatory. Yes, Spain and Uruguay are the favorites to take the top two spots, but I think it’ll be a harder group than people assume—Saudi Arabia, if you’ll recall, beat Argentina 2-1 at the 2022 World Cup group stage. And Spain has underperformed at every World Cup since taking the trophy in 2010: they didn’t get past the group stage in 2014, and were knocked out in the round of 16 by Russia in 2018 and Morocco in 2022. So.

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Group I

France

Senegal

Iraq

Norway

I refer you back to the Afcon debacle to explain why I will be rooting for Senegal, in addition to the former colonizer versus formerly colonized of it all. That being said, France’s team remains rather strong, coming off a convincing Champions League win for Paris Saint-Germain under which several squad members play … I don’t really see any other team leading the group, but I do think it’ll be a pretty fair fight between the remaining three countries for the runner-up spot. It’ll be a great few matches.

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Group L

England

Croatia

Panama

Ghana

I don’t think any of them will scroll down this far, but I have more English friends than I used to have so I can’t openly disparage Thomas Tuchel’s squad.6

However, I will say I never fail to find the “bring it home” chants funny.7 I mean, I appreciate enthusiasm paired with delusion as much as the next girl, but the conviction inevitably elicits a fond little chuckle. And the amount of controversy surrounding the omissions from the 26-man squad … like in no world should I know who Cole Palmer is. Nowhere in my head should reside the notion that “Harry Maguire should probably have been called up, too.” And yet. Here I am. Having my little thoughts about England’s football team. I do think they make it out of the group stage and into quarterfinals, but no further. And you know what? Quiet as it’s kept, this is actually one of the trickiest groups—I predict Ghana or Croatia take the top spot and England the second. Respectfully!

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Tl;dr: Happy World Cup, everyone. Let’s never forget how awful FIFA is. If you have thoughts, predictions, arguments, opinions: let me know in the comments. This is the main—maybe only—subject I’ll want to talk about for the next five weeks.

Thanks for reading! You can find me on instagram. The newsletter is fully supported by readers, so if you often find yourself thinking I enjoyed that and also I happen to have disposable income, please consider sharing the newsletter with a friend and/or becoming a paid subscriber for $6/month or $40/year. If not, honestly, that’s fine, too. I get it.

When I think of vacation/beach reads, I don’t necessarily think of light subject matter, but of physically light novels. When I’m traveling and frolicking, I don’t wanna carry a heavy book in addition to the sunscreen, phone, keys, wallet, years-long collection of crumpled receipts, and hand sanitizer of it all. A girl’s gotta impose a few limits on herself. If not me, who, etc.

Languid, portable prose is what we’re looking for here. Stories to while and wither away the long summer days. I mean, I like committing to a massive novel as much as the next girl, but during the hottest months of the year I prefer to switch it up—I enjoy a revolving door of shorter works. Tl;dr: I’ll wait till October to finally tackle Middlemarch.1

With that said, below is a list of 212 books I have brought or would bring with me on vacation or to the beach or to the pool or like, to the park on a sunny day. To a coffee shop after work, even. Work with me here. Summer is a time to photosynthesize, you just gotta find a place to do it. I’ve kept them all under 250 pages, which was challenging, so please clap.

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Asterisks denote books in translation (nine of 21!), and the links are to my bookshop.org affiliate shop, although as per usual, I strongly urge you to visit your local bookshop, if only to marvel at the deranged and incredible novels the staff is recommending.

(Scroll to the end to find the completed graph referenced in the below:)

Shortish books to bring with you on vacation, etc.

1. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1961) (160 pages)

2. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (1943) (224 pages)

3. Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1601) (140 pages)3

4. The White Album by Joan Didion (1979) (224 pages)

5. Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich* (1970) (192 pages)4

6. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (2019) (198 pages)

7. A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux (1983)* (96 pages)5

8. Heartburn by Nora Ephron (1983) (192 pages)

9. So Much Blue by Percival Everett (2017) (236 pages)6

10. The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel Garcia Marquez* (1970) (128 pages)

11. Valentino and Sagittarius: Two Novellas by Natalia Ginzburg* (1957) (134 pages)

12. Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri* (1294) (128 pages)7

13. No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021) (224 pages)

14. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952) (160 pages)8

15. The Carrying by Ada Limón (2018) (229 pages)9

16. The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck (1957) (176 pages)10

17. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger (1957) (176 pages)11

18. Greek Lessons by Han Kang* (2011) (192 pages)12

19. First Love by Ivan Turgenev* (1860) (112 pages)

20. Água Viva by Clarice Lispector* (1973) (88 pages)

21. Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico* (2022) (136 pages)

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And now, for the chart:

Does this (and the 349 footnotes below) make me look deranged? If he saw it, would Fox Mulder put together a cute little personality profile? The project kept my emotional support Canva tab open for hours, so I can’t begrudge it.

Happy reading, friends.13

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Thanks for reading! You can find me on instagram. The newsletter is fully supported by readers, so if you often find yourself thinking I enjoyed that and also I happen to have disposable income, please consider sharing the newsletter with a friend and/or becoming a paid subscriber for $6/month or $40/year. If not, honestly, that’s fine, too. I get it.

It’s not just now, and it’s not just the number one seed.2 Professional athletes and teams have been sponsored by sports apparel companies for a long time. But lately, the sponsorships have been getting out of control. Over the last few years, they’ve begun to take more of a starring role rather than lying discreetly in the background.

Brands in sports are not novel, of course. I know that; we all know that. The first time I remember becoming aware of the intricate post-match pre-interview preparation routine was watching Roger Federer’s jaunty little off-white sports coat following his victory at Wimbledon in 2006. I went down a deep YouTube rabbit hole that I’m pretty sure concerned my coffee shop neighbor, and it looks like the year prior, Federer’s only sponsored addition was a watch. No blazer for Wimbledon in 2005. Just vibes and sweat. The way sports should be.

Somewhere in the mid-2000s, then—incidentally, during logomania’s heyday—brands decided to up their stakes. To leverage the attention athletes were drawing from ever-growing audiences and engage in a little additional zhuzh. As a treat. Make every fan a future consumer of as many items and brands as possible. And why not! In 2006, people were famously buying things! More was more!

If you’ll allow me a spot of wild conjecture and generalization, it does make sense that in the years of excess prior to the global financial crisis3, Nike, in its infinite wisdom, decided that it was not enough for a player to wear their kit—their one measly kit, peasant stuff, really—on the court. No. A costume change was necessary. Roger Federer would now have to pack a cunty sports coat beside his extra rackets and protein drinks, and he would wear it, along with his Rolex, while lifting his trophy in front of whatever royal family member was around that day. One wonders how much more he was paid for this. One hopes it’s a lot—the very idea of putting on clean clothing over a four-hour build-up of sweat … in front of thousands of people … well, it should be expensive, is all I’m saying.

I was on a non-date recently when the subject of sports and advertising came up. Naturally. It’s either that or AI, these days.

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When the subject of John Travolta pops into my head, in a frequency that is surprisingly not never, here is the breakdown of what I think, in this exact order: long-time Scientologist (see also: does he know Elisabeth Moss?), bald because of Pitbull (see also: has Pitbull ever googled Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard?), and flies planes semi-professionally (see also: do he and fellow Scientologist Tom Cruise discuss aviation and plastic surgery together?).

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(I am so sorry for this but I desperately need you to indulge me in a Brief But Very Important Tangent because while doing my own googling, which I’ve apparently been slacking on, I found out that in the late 1970s, several high-ranking members of the Church of Scientology (including Mrs. L. Ron Hubbard) were indicted on grounds of espionage against the U.S. government, just a few short years after the Scientology founder and his minions were caught plotting to—I’m so serious—take over the town of Clearwater, Florida. Unrelatedly, I’m sure, Travolta’s $100 million residence is located in Ocala (horse capital of the world, baby!), a Floridian metropolis a mere two-hour drive from Clearwater. The twists and turns of this story have kept me up at night. Thank God for science fiction writers turned alleged cult leaders hiding in the California desert until their mysterious deaths.)

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But back to the berets. Person Who Shows Up At Cannes With Fits Worth At Least Three Watercooler Conversations is not one of the categories within which I’d classified John Travolta. He’s not Bella Hadid. Like, I just checked his IMDb and the most recent thing I’ve seen him in was the unfortunately-excellent O.J. season of American Crime Story, much as it pains me to ever compliment Ryan Murphy.1

(A second brief but very important tangent has hit the newsletter because once a month, I kid you not, I think of David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian mournfully and repeatedly and disappointedly saying, “Juice …” to Cuba Gooding Jr. as O.J. Simpson. A career-best from Schwimmer.

I was going to bury this one in a footnote but the compilation video—I think we all needed to see it.)

Back again. Unexpected, no, to wake up on a Monday morning to images of John Travolta in berets? But who am I to forsake a bit of secondhand joie de vivre? Such a thing would be foolish of me, and lately I’ve been trying my best to, quite specifically, not be a fool.

Which means that when I see a 72-year-old man at Cannes wearing an outfit almost uncomfortably reminiscent of my outfit, donned in 2018 at Versailles, itself inspired by Audrey Hepburn’s Paris outfit in Funny Face2 … well! Life is hard, and I’m gonna take this moment as a GIFT is what I’m gonna do.

Which obviously leads me to:

Anyway. Shoutout to whimsy. Travolta said his ode to the French pseudo-intellectual (I say this with love) was actually an homage to the “old school directors [who] wore berets and the glasses.” 100%, man. For sure.

I’ve been watching too much television but it’s quality stuff

I finished watching the Apple TV+ series adaptation of Rufi Thorpe’s gorgeous novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles (2026) and I think it might be my favorite book-to-series adaptation since Normal People? No spoilers, but—if I’m remembering the book correctly—they seem to have excluded just one major plot point, and while it worked very well in the novel, I don’t think its exclusion actually weakens the series. It’s also one of the best-cast productions I’ve seen in years … Elle Fanning carries it exquisitely, but I was particularly delighted by Michelle Pfeiffer and Nick Offerman’s turns as Margo’s parents. If no one’s got me, I know David E. Kelley’s got me.3

Before that, I’d watched Los Años Nuevos (2025), a series that had been sold to me as the Spanish response to Normal People (accidentally sticking to a certain theme today, it appears). It’s a love story—I guess—told over the course of ten episodes and ten years, each of which takes place on a different New Year’s Eve. Ana and Oscar are 30 when they meet in the first episode, and the comings and goings of their lives and relationship(s) and heartbreaks and joys over the next decade … well, folks, it wrecked me a little! I was spiraling between may this love never find me and may this love find me immediately. A perfect show to watch on a lazy Sunday if you’re gonna be depressed anyway.

I’ve also been keeping up with Widow’s Bay (2026), which Apple TV classifies as a comedy-horror series (why not)—it’s good, and I’m not just saying that because after The Americans, I’d quietly follow Matthew Rhys to the ends of the earth.

And lastly! Last night I finished Hal & Harper (2025), a limited series starring Cooper Raiff, Lili Reinhart, Betty Gilpin, and Mark Ruffalo, and I had a great time. Like, I definitely cried every other episode watching these two deeply codependent twenty-something siblings try to figure out their lives, but I had a great time. The series is tonally similar to the Dakota Johnson vehicle Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022), which Raiff also wrote/directed/created. A real Marc by Marc Jacobs situation we’ve got going with this guy, but it’s fine, it more or less works. He wields a sort of earnest and self-deprecating millennial humor that may not work for everyone, but Hal and Harper is slightly less self-indulgent than Cha Cha, mostly because Raiff gives his co-stars more time to shine and I, for one, believe Reinhart continues to be severely underrated.4

I hate to bring up Sally Rooney again, but if your favorite part of Intermezzo was the sibling relationship between Ivan and Peter, then you kinda need to watch Hal & Harper.

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P.S. I’m working on a summer book guide of sorts inspired by my favorite disassociation setting: the beach. Fair warning, what makes a beach read for me is portability, which does not necessarily align with literary levity. Like, Kafka wrote short novels. I won’t let myself get overtaken by existentialist reads, and we all know that I do not scoff at romance novels, but … far be it from me to mislead anyone. Steinbeck will be on the summer book guide.

Thanks for reading! You can find me on instagram. The newsletter is fully supported by readers, so if you often find yourself thinking I enjoyed that and also I happen to have disposable income, please consider sharing the newsletter with a friend and/or becoming a paid subscriber for $6/month or $40/year. If not, honestly, that’s fine, too. I get it.

Everlane, the formerly high-flying Millennial direct-to-consumer basics brand, is being sold to Shein by its majority owner, L Catterton … The deal, which values the company at $100 million, was approved by the board on Saturday …. L Catterton and Everlane’s current C.E.O., Alfred Chang, had been searching for an investor to clear about $90 million in debt—a $25 million loan from Gordon Brothers, and a $65 million asset-based revolving credit line. (Puck)

(I think we’re not discussing the $100 million valuation2 enough … like, with respect to the American dollar, that is pocket change. A measly 5% of the Eras Tour ticket sales. In this economy? With inflation the way it is? I don’t wanna embarrass anyone, but these are not serious numbers.)

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Now, I can’t and won’t lie to you: this did tickle my funny bone. I remember when Everlane was a little-known San Francisco-based brand quietly favored by a Suits-era Meghan Markle, who wore their eventually-somewhat-ubiquitous logoless tote on one of her first public outings with Harry (and why must my brain be burdened with this information at the click of a synapse like I did not have to look this up and that is probably at least one of the reasons why I can no longer perform long division by hand).

Talk of this brand, which for a long time I believed was Canadian because that is how unassumingly it positioned itself, really takes me back. Mostly to one of my most annoying acquaintances back in New York, who used to brag about how she was shopping at Everlane way before the first brick-and-mortar store opened in Soho in 2017, thank you very much, like she was personally responsible for single-handedly saving the rainforest all because she bought leather flats from Everlane and not, like, Steve Madden. God, it is so hard to be in theoretical agreement with self-righteous people. Makes you understand why the messenger is always getting shot.

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Let’s lay the personal cards on the proverbial table, then.

I’ll admit that circa 2016-2021 I did buy quite a few pieces from Everlane: I was literally living in New York and going to law school; when the company created a target demographic they had a picture of my anxious little face on their marketing decks. Still, I’m proud to say I never took a stab at their weird little flats. I have this irrational hatred against campaigns to make ugly shoes appealing to consumers. Apologies for having eyes, I guess. This is incidentally also why from an aesthetic perspective, Rothys have never failed to viscerally upset me.3

So yes, I was a fan. I hadn’t yet figured out the impossibility of ethical consumption, and I loved the idea that through equipping my closet with various unassuming shades of black and beige and grey I could also do my part in like, rebuilding the Great Barrier Reef.

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It’s not that I’m a bury-my-head-in-the-sand girlie. In fact, the only thing I have in common with ostriches is weirdly long legs for our height.1 Frankly, I’m an overly observant person who loooves self-awareness. But I’ve learned to curb my destructive little habits, which is how I know that paying too close attention to the cruise industry will bring me nothing but grief. Therein lies madness, etc.

I say this as someone who has been on a cruise ship. In college, to be fair, so it comes very close to not counting, but still. I was there, I remember it.2

The truth is I do not think cruise ships should be real. Beyond the theoretical and the historical, I mean. There’s the Titanic situation, yes, that’s a big one, although I do think the “Rose had room for Jack on the door” engagement bait is a flashing sign of our crumbling literacy, but there’s also the Petri dish of it all. Like, there are people who don’t shower at night going on these cruises. Breathing in stale air like it’s Eden.3

These companies really said let’s get hundreds or thousands of people together in a steel cage for several days—weeks!—and hope for the best. And you know what, let’s offer them unlimited alcohol while we’re at it. Make it a real party. Let’s give germs a good chance to flourish and evolve. I love that. The optimism of it. Breathtaking.

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Then there’s the fact that I don’t love going anywhere I can’t leave without a high chance of perishing. I still quake in fear when I think of the Scientology service I attended at sixteen to appease my curiosity, giggling with my summer camp friends as though we weren’t risking our chances of ever being prescribed anxiety meds. I mean, yes, I got a lot of mileage out of it, they still talk about the stories I told that July, but nevertheless—insane of me. Crazy, the things a person will do while waiting for their prefrontal cortex to finish cooking.

Do you remember the OceanGate submersible that exploded in the Atlantic back in 2023? At the time, I wrote,

That feeling of vastness we feel in the middle of the ocean isn’t peace—it’s the foreboding sense of being somewhere we don’t belong. There is a reason why very dramatic people (Virginia Woolf, Kendall Roy) are so attracted to the sea as a means to an end: as it repeatedly tries to tell us, it is not meant for us.

I stand by this.

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If you’re curious, here are the last couple of five things for your viewing pleasure:

And if you’re looking for a regular cadence re these installments… good luck, babe.1

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1. Literacy is alive and well thank you very much …

Over the last fifteen years, do you want to know how many times I’ve started The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s super chill novel about patricide? Four times. Each time, I managed a couple hundred pages before abandoning the Russian tome and turning to more manageable tasks, like scheduling root canals and understanding tax law. Which is why when announced it as his 2026 read-along, I took a deep breath, bought the cheapest edition I could find, and set myself up for a fifth iteration of self-imposed disappointment. I told myself that well, I had a whole year to read it, and that was the point: slow, conscientious reading of this, a normal and uncomplicated novel admired by famously-normal and uncomplicated people like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Sigmund Freud.

So imagine my surprise when, on April 29, sevenish months ahead of schedule, I somehow reached page 870 of the Wordsworth edition I’d been carrying with me from bed to couch and from couch to bed for the last three months.2 I felt accomplished. Successful. An academic, almost. The next time people referenced The Brothers Karamazov, I realized, I’d be able to say something obnoxious and insane, like “you know, I read it, but I prefer Anna Karenina.”3 God. What a thrill.

2. … As is the celebration of low stakes anniversaries

Last week, I was out with a friend when we realized that the next day would make a year since we’d first met. And how can I say this … the news of our upcoming friendship anniversary caught us with a couple of drinks in our system, so inevitably: we made it a whole thing. We made the event everyone’s business, explaining why we were checking the time every fifteen seconds in the run-up to 12 o’clock. And then, when the clock—our respective phones, not-so-delicately tapped with increasing frequency—did strike midnight, we whooped and cheered and clinked our nearly-empty glasses like it was New Year’s. It was wholesome and silly and made my entire week.

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I’d make accidental celebrations of low-stakes events my new personality trait, but it’d be a bit like trying to recreate a perfect day crafted by luck and happenstance, wouldn’t it? Can never step into the same river twice and all that.

3. We can enjoy one (1) parent-coded show, as a treat

Back in March I started watching the new HBO show Rooster, starring Steve Carrell and Danielle Deadwyler.4 Let’s get this out in the open: Rooster is not what I would call an example of good television. At all. If aliens came down to earth and asked for recs, I’d advise them to watch like, Roswell (1999-2002), before alerting them to the existence of Rooster.

The thing about Rooster is that it is undoubtedly a parent show. And I know you know what I mean. You’ll call your parents on a Sunday afternoon and after hearing about all the new illnesses besetting distant family members you’ve never heard of in your life, there’ll be a brief pause and suddenly your mom will be like, “oh, your dad and I started watching this new show The Seven Problematic Lives of the Sicilian Gentleman and His Much Younger Third Wife, have you heard of it? It’s on Paramount+ and it stars Ewan McGregor.”5

No one else has heard of this show but your parents but when you google it you realize that it is real so you say “that sounds cool, I’ll check it out.” And then you never do. Because Paramount+ costs $117/month.

Well. Joke’s on me, because this time I was the one recommending such a series to my parents. This time I was the one with the deranged elevator pitch: “It’s about a writer played by Steve Carrell who starts teaching at this prestigious liberal arts university in New England to get closer to his daughter, also a professor, who is spiraling because her husband—also a professor, and you’ll know him because he played that guy on Ted Lasso—cheated on her with a grad student.” Shameless. Shameless pandering to the parent-coded audience. But I don’t care, because I’m enjoying it. It’s low-stakes and Connie Britton is occasionally a guest star and it’s cozy because it’s set in a college town in New England and it panders to the liberal elite, to which I happily belong. Again: objectively not a good series. But it doesn’t make me wanna eject myself directly into the surface of the sun, and that’s not nothing.

4. A few of my favorite recent newsletters

I’m trying to catch up on newsletters and manage the Absolute State of my inbox, but a girl’s only got 24 hours in a day, and once the weather goes on spring mode, it takes all of me not to just spend all my time frolicking in the sun.

That being said, ahead are some of the newsletters I’ve loved the last few weeks:

• ’s “Me & My Desk” series is the writer’s version of a what’s in my bag and it delights me—her most recent edition with Juliet Nicolson was no exception;

• ’s “sometimes books are hard to read” was a perfect preaching-to-the-choir moment for me because am I not always saying people should become more pretentious, which is really just an annoying way to say people should at least occasionally consume art that challenges and improves them?6;

• I loved ’s dive into the perils of overindulging on nostalgia “You Liked It? Watch It Again;”

• ’s “AI’s got nothing on a woman’s loneliness” because imagine writing “I am lonely and I will never stop trying not to be, and that doesn’t make me a fool” and then just going about your day;

• ’s “‘Just Know That You’re Poisoning Yourself’” made me laugh multiple times!;

• ’s “Imaginary Injuries” was a brilliant review of The Drama and a response to some people’s (insane) reaction to it; and

• I’ll join the chorus of admirers and recommend ’s “The Botox Psyop,” which served as a gentle little slap in the face for whenever I’m like everyone I know is doing things to their faces except for me like ok Clara get a goddamn grip.

5. It’s a great time for music for people who are sad while understanding that, rationally, they should be happy

I’m not sure what we’ve done to deserve all the incredible new albums released this spring—maybe it’s a reward for surviving, etc. When you make it through the winter and emerge from the underworld, good weather is TBD but there is a new Kacey Musgraves album waiting for you and isn’t that just as good as sunny skies? The argument could be made!

A few new albums I’ve been listening to:

• Noah Kahan’s The Great Divide because I love when music panders to my chronic malaise and I mean that (there was a day last week I listened to “23” approximately seventeen times, and then he showed up at ’s concert and they sang “Downfall” together and so the next day I listened to that on repeat)7;

• Jorge Drexler’s Taracá, a celebration of candombe and homecoming and the inherent, inevitable creation and evolution of music that’s proved a lovely balm to any Kahan-aided despair (“Ante la duda, baila” immediately went into my Spring ‘26 playlist and thus far it’s never once failed to cheer me up);

• Yerai Cortés’s POPULAR, because you very much cannot beat the energy of modernish flamenco on a warm spring day (listen to “PIOPIOO” and tell me I’m wrong!);

• Kacey Musgraves’s Middle of Nowhere, which is an unapologetic return to country and Texas and small towns and yes, to a fair bit of melancholy, too. I might write more about it because when it comes to constructing cohesive narratives via albums, Musgraves is one of the best to ever do it, and not just within country music, either. It’s why when I listen to her music, it’s hard for me to isolate it to one or two songs instead of experiencing the full album (that being said, I’ve been allowing “Hell On Me” to crush me multiple times a day since I first heard it on Friday).

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I found myself so fascinated by Sorrentino, and so distracted by the many tangents I wanted to explore from the locus of the Italian director and his films—specifically La grazia and La grande bellezza (2013)—that I decided to dedicate a whole newsletter to him and to them.

Despite my vague awareness of Sorrentino and his, shall we call it, eccentricity?, I was somewhat dismayed to realize I was missing a significant amount of foundational lore.

I could’ve guessed he was born in Naples, given how many of his films feature the city and/or protagonists from the same. And honestly, I should have guessed he was orphaned as a teenager, given how many of his films feature a search for a home, for family, for belonging. Like, of course this man was faced with a deep, all-encompassing tragedy at sixteen years old.

And of course Maradona played a role.

This is why research matters. This is me learning my lesson. Never again will I neglect my beloved IMDb, a website that remains anxiously attached to the beautiful UX of whatever designer last updated it back in 2007. (This, to be clear, is a compliment.)

Now that we all have this information, then, a brief second prologue: the first Sorrentino film I watched was La grande bellezza, which my university was somehow showing at its cinema? Shoutout to whatever obnoxious film studies major made that happen, I owe them big. We left the small theater in a daze, the humidity of the Miami spring evening sticking to our skin, keeping us for hours still embroiled in Sorrentino’s flushed, decadent, and sumptuous Rome. There’s nothing like being stupid and young and walking to your local Thai restaurant with your fellow stupid and young friends, realizing you’ve just watched a film you’ll think about for years to come. A burst of energy hits you like okay this is what it means to be alive. A feeling to chase forever. It’s why I go to the cinema.

I rewatched La grande bellezza a few weeks ago in preparation for La grazia, in part because both films feature Sorrentino’s frequent collaborator (and fellow Neapolitan) Toni Servillo and in part because the last time I’d seen it I was twenty years old and sitting next to someone I was crushing on and would end up dating—and the thing is, you can’t fully appreciate a film if you’re too keenly aware of every expression your face is making. You just can’t.

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Anyway, I watched the 2013 film in solitude this time, at home, over a decade older, and I can confirm it holds up beautifully. A story about the most social and charismatic 65-year-old man you’ve ever met coming to terms with his age. Life’s failures. The role he has played in crafting his own disappointments. Accepting them. It’s a film that, both at 20 and 33, made me feel wistful and sad and lonely and in a way forgiving, if not exactly compassionate.

*

The Eternal City portrayed in La grazia is of a considerably less louche nature than that of La grande bellezza. Instead of a study in sustained depravity, the former displays for us a staid, almost prim capital city; the seat of government rather than the seat of debauchery. In La grazia, Servillo plays not a writer at the center of Rome’s cultural and social elite, but Italy’s head of state coming to the end of his seven-year term. Instead of the distant, magnetic, and self-assured Jep Gambardella hopping from lavish party to lavish party in a seemingly never-ending Trastevere night, we’re treated to the measured, quiet, and—still—distant Mariano de Santis, reluctant Presidente della Repubblica and father to Dorotea, his fellow lawyer, faithful adviser, and most frequent challenger.1

With just six months left in the President’s mandate, there are two pressing and lingering matters requiring his approval: a controversial law legalizing euthanasia and potential pardons for two convicted murderers. A man beset by the doubt he believes to be his greatest virtue despite the frustration it provokes in his staff, de Santis weighs these decisions heavily and cautiously. Too cautiously, his daughter tells him. At some point, the deliberation period must come to an end. At some point, a decision must be reached.2

A devout Catholic who considers the Pope his friend, de Santis is plagued by the choices set before him. It is through this affliction, this paralyzing doubt, that the film deals with the binary of faith and reason. Or faith and truth. Or faith and duty.

(If John Patrick Shanley hadn’t beat him to it in 2008, I’m pretty sure Sorrentino would’ve liked to call his film Il dubbio (Doubt) as opposed to La grazia. But alas. If you’re not first you’re last.)

A recurring theme in La grazia and his other films is an overpowering preoccupation with the impact of that which cannot be seen or proven.

In the Sorrentino universe, the craving for certainty—for truth—will never be fulfilled, because it presupposes our ability to perceive every variable. And that, the director repeatedly asserts, is an impossibility. Our understanding of ourselves and of our own environment is, whether by design or by circumstances, necessarily limited.

The sooner we accept that finite knowledge is the name of the game, Sorrentino seems to say, the sooner we can let go of any unrealistic expectations for certitude and give sentimentality a little more room to grow. Life is inhospitably heavy, and the only cure for that burden is intentional levity.

It’s an approach that makes sense from someone who at sixteen years old lost his parents in a senseless tragedy, who himself only escaped their same fate by virtue of teenage devotion to a football legend. Saved from a certain death by the twin forces of scheduling and passion. How indeed can someone with such a past believe in a world imbued in anything but chaos? And isn’t chaos what we by any other name would call faith—a belief that to attempt to understand the twists and turns of our lives is an exercise in futility?

*

The journey toward this acceptance makes up much of the Sorrentino cinematic universe. In that vein, his characters tend to face two principal conflicts: dissatisfaction with the world and their lives within it and, not unrelatedly, the realization that they are running out of time.3

Jep, haunted by the memory of the girl he once loved and the career he thought he’d have; Mariano, haunted by his dead wife’s decades-old bout of infidelity and the timidity that has characterized his mandate; both men, the loneliest people in Rome, wondering what the point of it all was.

This unlucky partnering of malaise and proximity to death means that, in the last act of his films, we can nearly always find a desperate and necessary surrender. It’s hopeful. Not a ceding of control, really, and certainly not an embrace of nihilism, but an exhale.

What makes a life worth living? The answer is often: the mere fact of it being lived at all. To exist in such a way as to save us from alienation, by working toward the goal, asymptotic as it might be, of learning as much as possible about ourselves and each other. To steal and give love in the process. Because if it’s all chaos anyway, then why not?

No clearer answer will spring forth, and to look for one is to impose a rationality that will drive us insane: it does not exist. And if it does exist, it is certainly not for us to perceive. (Paolo Sorrentino would not have thrived in the Enlightenment, I can tell you that much.)

This surrender requires a degree of levity. It’s why the films are darkly funny, too. Less que será será, more madonna, well, I guess there for the grace of God go I. A lightness, as captured in Mariano de Santis’ newfound love of Italian rap, listened to with his eyes closed in the somber rooms of the President’s Palazzo del Quirinale—the sort of lightness, Sorrentino suggests, that makes the disorder of our existence bearable.

Underneath the striking and Catholic imagery in which Sorrentino dabbles is a latent search not for God, but for divinity. It is a quest for the pockets of the divine within the sordid and persistent mundanity of our daily lives. Secularism—by way of order and rationality—is anathema to his stories; it’s nothing but a fruitless attempt to convince ourselves of our ability to control our own destinies. In order to truly live, we must forsake this delusion. Even if it takes our whole lives to see it.

It’s a heady task, which explains why Jep and Mariano are constantly on the verge of losing their minds. And it is why faith takes on such a towering role in La grande bellezza and La grazia; it’s not about religion, but surrender. Existence might be mundane, but to live, Sorrentino seems to say, to live—is divine.

*

Thanks for reading! You can find me on instagram. The newsletter is fully supported by readers, so if you often find yourself thinking I enjoyed that and also I happen to have disposable income, please consider sharing the newsletter with a friend and/or becoming a paid subscriber for $6/month or $40/year. If not, honestly, that’s fine, too. I get it.

But women’s stories matter, so let’s tell the story of Reese Witherspoon’s AI journey.

When an industry, a stance, a technology—etc—becomes controversial, there are few actions more productive to proponents of the same than to collect and/or assign and/or recruit a few female spokespeople. Respectable women. Titans of industry, even. Vocal defenders of the female plight, as most perfectly evidenced, wouldn’t you know it, by their own individual plight (overcome, of course, via vim and perseverance—how else to become a titan of industry, an honorary member of the old boys’ club? Do keep up!).

I see what’s happening here, by the way. I see what supporters (see also: investors) of AI are attempting. The playbook is insultingly conspicuous. They’re trying to make the usage of AI a matter of feminism. As someone burdened with the questionable gift of an absurdly excellent memory, I can tell you right now: I have seen this film before. The Powers That Be, if you’ll allow me a bit of triteness, looove to drape problematic behavior in the fineries of Big Feminism.

This is of course the Trojan horse that there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women let in. That was huge. Meant that any criticism of women, however valid, needed to be diluted by a painstaking three-paragraph introduction (see above)—a justification detailing why exactly we’re allowed to engage in such critique: do we not believe in gender equality? Name three women you would die/kill/go into crippling debt for.

God, how tiresome. How distracting. How clever, the imposition of the notion that to be a powerful woman means, necessarily, to be a feminist, and thus immune to rebuke.

Enter Reese: Oscar winner, forehead-haver, person partially responsible for keeping the lights on my sleep paralysis demon series The Morning Show, and co-founder of Hello Sunshine, a multi-media company that’s produced shows like Big Little Lies, Daisy Jones and the Six, and The Last Thing He Told Me. Hello Sunshine’s stated mission is to amplify female-driven stories—a laudable goal, to be clear! One I appreciate! I love women’s stories! I’m living one myself!

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Hello Sunshine’s business model has historically relied on novels or memoirs written by women—these are promoted via Reese’s Book Club (part of the Hello Sunshine corporate structure because if you wanna get ahead in this world you simply cannot skip the synergistic subsidiaries!) and a lucky few’s film/television rights are bought by Hello Sunshine so that, within 12 to 18 months, they can reach us, the consumers, via Hulu/Netflix/Amazon/Apple TV. A one-stop shop for women who support other women!

This brings us to the reason we’re here today. A week or so ago, Witherspoon hopped on Instagram reels and peppily declared that we need to get on board with genAI, because at her ten-woman book club she asked who among them was using AI and only three of them raised their hand, and of those three, only one said she really understood AI. This troubled Reese.

Several things about this reel are interesting to me. Anyone who’s dabbled in video content—a population that includes yours truly, if you’ll recall—is aware of how intentional this composition is.

Forget for a moment the concept of the scientific method, with which Witherspoon seems to have dispensed for this thorough and bias-free study on AI female usage.

(Is it possible, perhaps, that some of the seven women who didn’t raise their hands are ethically or morally against AI? Maybe they would like to retain the ability to put together a sentence or complete a task without outsourcing brain cells to a company guzzling millions of gallons of water and stealing intellectual property from artists? I don’t know! Seemed like it might’ve been a worthy follow-up, Reese!)

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The last time I was in Paris was November 2024, so not very long ago; I’d gone with my best friend who’d never been there before, so we did a lot of the touristy things—which have their charm, mind you—while also enduring a sort of bone-chilling cold that frequently left us numb and irritated. A gorgeous combination, I’ll have you know.

This time, I was there with , who was bravely hoping to impart some of her less conditional appreciation for the city to me. She was, I should say, moderately successful. More importantly, we had fun practicing our French, talking movies, and alternating between wine and not-wine. Ideally, she doesn’t hate me for my frequent utterances of “it’s only a 55-minute walk if we wanna do that?”

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Before we get started, I really cannot emphasize enough how much the following is not a travel guide. I’m fascinated by other people’s travel diaries because I find it interesting to see what others choose to do and how they feel when visiting a place that’s not their home. Last year I did one for Porto and another for San Sebastián. It’s fun for me, but it’s not serious.

Walking

I assume this happens to other people because I have never once had an original thought and/or experience, but nearly every time I’m about to go on a trip, I regret booking it. Not because I don’t want to go, but because I’m like hold on, being home and having my little routine is so great? Why would I interrupt it with an airport and a flight and a four-day continuous search for clean [enough] public restrooms and good [enough] coffee and an endless cycle of figuring out if it’s better to return to the hotel for a quick nap before dinner or just consume enough caffeine to ensure a delirious sort of wakefulness?1

Disregarding the fact that this is quite clearly a sign of impeccable mental health, thank you very much, the good thing is all this hesitation and regret more or less fades away as soon as I’m on my way to the airport. I can always trust inertia to play the role of savior/culprit in my life—a sort of consistency I appreciate.

If this light anxiety does not fade as soon as the trip starts, though, once I reach my destination I can count on a long walk to succeed where the mere passage of time failed. When I go somewhere new and do something as familiar to me as walking, it almost makes me feel at home. Like yes, okay, the ominous threat of shin splints is recognizable wherever I am in the world. That’s comforting.

I’m predisposed to harbor all sorts of goodwill for any city that allows itself to be safely walked for hours on end, despite its [French] flaws, because then what I end up remembering from the trip are the snippets of conversation I overheard on this or that street, the bars I popped into for a brief break, the photos I tried to take that fell hilariously short of reality, the albums pouring out of my headphones, and the people walking beside me.

A walk is an inherently sentimental thing! You are literally going places! Physically carrying yourself from one state to another! There’s magic in that! The body keeps the score in good ways, too!

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, I walked a lot in Paris. No shin splints because this time around, unlike in November ‘24, I wasn’t walking up and down Montmartre every day (why did I do this exactly? nobody can tell me), but I still happily collapsed at the end of every night, which is really all I ever want from a city vacation.

Culture, etc.

At the end of the day, I’m someone who enjoys a little museum visit. I’m sorry, but the words “there’s a new exhibit at [x]” sends a thrill down my spine. You’d think that after a handful of visits to Paris, I’d perhaps be tapped out of its museum lobby, but you’d be mistaken. No Louvre this time, no, but we did go to the Orsay, which I find more pleasant than the former due to its more manageable surface area and visitor count—that, and the fact that I remain an impressionism girl. Sue me. I like Audrey Hepburn, too.

(Tangent! Over the last couple of months I’ve been watching these lectures the National Gallery in London publishes on specific artists and/or paintings. They’re all free to watch on the museum’s YouTube channel, and I’ll be frank, the lectures from before Covid are better than the more recent ones, but there’s a generous backlog that’s very much worth perusing. Some of my favorites: Vincent Van Gogh and Gauguin; Titian’s myth of Ariadne and Bacchus; JMW Turner’s “The Evening Star”; and Caravaggio’s life and style in three paintings. There’s a lot there if you’re interested in learning more about art history!)

There was indeed a Renoir exhibit at the Orsay, and scrap what I said about the manageable visitor count, because every tourist in Paris was located in this exact set of rooms, gently elbowing each other to take mostly mediocre photos of the artist’s romantic and bright little scenes. Naturally, I engaged in my own exercise in mediocrity. I hate to be excluded.

I will say I enjoyed the Van Gogh rooms more. Was it because I had a solid one foot radius around which to safely move without running into a fellow museum visitor? We’ll literally never know.

Something I kept thinking about—remember, I’m an empath—as I walked by the art from Vincent’s Arles era is how the paint supply store guys must have hated to see him coming. Like oh here comes the Dutch man in search of yellow again, we’re gonna have to tell him we ran out and it’ll be a whole thing! (In my defense, I’d been awake for a long time by the time we went to the Orsay that evening.)

No one has ever framed a photo better btw. No, it’s not tilted.

We also went to the National Archives, where I’d never been before, and they happened to be displaying an exhibit on Lafayette, so Marion and I engaged in a teensy bit of patriotism and reminisced about Hamilton. It took about seven hours for “Guns and Ships” to exit my brain, even though I will forever maintain that “Wait for It” is the musical’s best song. Anyway. This has been your quarterly reminder that I am indeed a Broadway baby.

We also saw The Drama (no spoilers, literally do not fret)

I love doing a few mundane things while traveling. Things I’d be doing if I actually lived there. I think it’s because at the end of the trip, when I inevitably ask myself the question could I live here, I want to have an answer founded on more than liking the museum and a long walk across Île de la Cité, lovely as both of these are. So yes, let me visit the grocery store and peruse the aisles for a quick fifteen minutes. Let me carve a routine out of going to the same cafe three mornings in a row.

And yes, let me go to the cinema. Because no, I wouldn’t say visiting Les Halles movie theater is at the top of any travel blog’s top ten things to do in the French capital, but escaping the afternoon rain for a couple hours to experience a crowded screening of The Drama teeming with Parisians audibly (and rightly, if I may) rooting for Zendaya? To the tune of leave the gun, take the cannoli: skip the Louvre, go to the movies.

The “spoiler” situation, if we wanna call it that, is a real minefield when it comes to The Drama, so I won’t say anything yet2 except that I need whoever convinced Harry Styles to stop acting to get on the horn and dial Alana Haim. Respectfully, I can’t do this anymore. S’il te plaît.

Eating and drinking

To be soooo completely honest, I know people are like ooh la la qu’est-ce qu’on va manger ici, quel excitement, etc., but I’m personally not someone who goes to Paris to eat well. I don’t particularly adore French food and I follow a plant-based diet, so I’m mostly oh-for-two when it comes to meals in that city.

That being said: I had multiple rounds of French fries, ate some of the best (1) porridge and (2) Lebanese food of my life, and drank a variety of alcoholic beverages at deeply cute locales. Photographic evidence, along with restaurant/bar names, below.

Hold on, for the rest I just put together the most deranged collage I’ve ever been responsible for. The falafel plate is from Aux Dés Calés 18 on 11, Rue Moreau and the place with “La Cave” neon sign is from Divvino in Le Marais. The fries are fries, you can get fries anywhere. The bread at the top is an onion fougasse that I ate in a fugue state half an hour before heading to the airport.

Lastly: Stéréo, a gorgeous listening/wine bar between Pigalle and Saint-Georges where Marion and I went on our last night and after which we walked by Dianna Agron, inspiringly and chronically unemployed former Gleek.

Things I was glad to get back to when I returned home

• My beloved bowls of cereal slop. (I’ve written about this before because it really is that serious for me, but these bowls involve: bran cereal; a chocolatey sort of granola that the store calls muesli as if they want to gaslight me into believing I’m being healthier than I actually am but they know and I know that it’s not muesli it’s granola; half a banana; a handful of strawberries or whatever berry I have available; yogurt; a generous dollop of peanut butter; and milk. Best part of my day, I fear.)

• Coffee at home, especially the two cups I drink during my morning journaling.

• The very specific noises of my apartment.

• The 3-5 meandering routes I choose between on any given day.

• Gossiping irl with my friends. In-person gossip just hits different.

And that’s it, folks. Congratulations to all of us for making it this far. x

Thanks for reading! You can find me on instagram. The newsletter is fully supported by readers, so if you often find yourself thinking I enjoyed that and also I happen to have disposable income, please consider sharing the newsletter with a friend and/or becoming a paid subscriber for $6/month or $40/year. If not, honestly, that’s fine, too. I get it.

This Sunday, as I accidentally walked 13.4 miles, shot photos of approximately 137 building façades, consumed three to five cups of mediocre coffee1, and ate my body weight in french fries, my mind kept wandering back to the Holy See, famous for its art collection, its starring role in Conclave (2024), and for being the funniest country (“country”) an overzealous student could be assigned to represent at a Model UN conference.

When last year the newly elected Pope turned out to be not just American, but midwestern, I had to physically restrain myself from literally whooping. For a few days, I’d be out with friends and have to hold back from breaking into a little did you guys hear about the Pope? A Chicago man! He’s probably also seen While You Were Sleeping (1995) and had impure thoughts about Peter Gallagher and/or Bill Pullman! Like, I’m used to a momentary shock of patriotism during the Olympics, but I never expected it to come roaring back over the election of an American Pope. A humbling moment.

Like, in no world do I want to share a source of happiness with one J.D. Vance, vice president and adult convert to Catholicism with credible ties to grim reaperdom.

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Lucky (?) for all of us, the president and his lackeys are currently engaging in a unilateral tiff with the Vatican for preaching the egregiously offensive, unnatural, and of course overly liberal values of … caring for thy neighbor. Practically heresy, that. Trump is upset, you see, that the Pope is following the teachings of one Jesus Christ and suggesting that immigrants should be treated like human beings. That entire civilizations shouldn’t be threatened with extinction by the sitting president of the United States.

Humanity??? Perish the thought, said Trump’s Jesus, showing us that actually, maybe we can create new and inventive stories from old IP. It’s time for a new New Testament, folks!

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Clara, aren’t all non-children’s films made of, for, and by adults? Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you! But no. I’m talking grown-ups. I’m talking normal people1 who go to work and attend dinner parties and take walks in the park and do a weekly grocery shop and have clean homes and enjoy stable friendships. People who look and act their big age. Who live in a society and not their own little world.

I’ve been gravitating toward these films again recently, in part because rewatches and warmly-lit interiors bring me inner peace … but mostly because, at a time of rampant arrested development among folks in my age group and beyond, they show what to me is the Platonic ideal of adulthood.

Let me explain.

As a teenager, I liked You’ve Got Mail because it depicted the life I assumed I’d eventually have. As an adult, I love it because it shows me the kind of existence—and the kinds of relationships and conversations and professions and homes and interests and hobbies— I should aim for. Because let’s be honest, these films are essentially a comedy of manners for the modern age. It’s people talking and going to each other’s houses and engaging in petty (but never cruel) gossip.

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Not to make this a full circle moment, but it’s no wonder that You’ve Got Mail features Pride and Prejudice so prominently.2 Jane Austen is, when you think about it, the unspoken patron saint of the Ephron cinematic universe.

There’s something unreal but allllmost tangible about the interpersonal relationships in films like You’ve Got Mail—it’s the politeness, the frankness, the no-hard-feelings of it all. Give or take a couple emotional affairs, everyone more or less acts—if not at once, then eventually—as someone in their circumstances ought, and it’s on the strength of Ephron’s (and Meyers’s … and Curtis’s) skill as a writer and a director that instead of this behavior making the characters and the stories boring or staid or overly predictable or worse, moralistic, it mostly renders them entertainingly human. This should be an impossible balance to strike, mind you! And yet there I am, once a quarter, clocking in to the Kathleen Kelly-Joe Fox conflict resolution factory.

There’s a real do not let your current and utterly unobjectionable romantic partner keep you from finding the love of your life energy to Ephron’s writing that I find deeply inspiring.

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Which brings me to another, more recent work that for inexplicable reasons received very little buzz this awards season: The Testament of Ann Lee (2025). Starring a captivating Amanda Seyfried, the film tells the story of the founding leader of the Shaker Movement, the Quaker spin-off that began in Manchester circa 1747 before taking its talents to America a few decades later.

(This isn’t about the film, but every few weeks I watch this video of the actress playing the dulcimer and singing Joni Mitchell’s “California.” You can sense Jimmy Fallon almost disassociating, as if being in the presence of true talent at this stage in his career makes him uncomfortable. All room for empty obsequiousness snuffed out.)

The Testament of Ann Lee is two hours and sixteen minutes of breathtaking insanity, a biopic that is not a biopic, a musical in text but not spirit, accent work that I just know made the hot dialect coach on YouTube proud, lighting that did not make me squint at the screen despite being partly set in a literal mill in 18th century England … I do not understand how it did not garner more recognition. It’s been days and I’m still thinking about it.

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God, just typing that gave me goosebumps. What will I see next?

It’s not that I place too high a value on awards1 or particularly trust these organizations’ nominating skills and/or procedures2, but I do care—a lot—about one thing, and that is being an informed hater. I loooove a well-founded opinion strongly held by me. It’s like oh, who is she? Her, with the perpetually furrowed brow and frequently flawless hair? Just a girl who knows what she’s talking about because she did her homework.

A reminder, I guess, that I’m on Letterboxd. I try to do the pithy review thing, but sometimes it mostly ends up being a brief diary entry, more than anything.

Below I discuss The Secret Agent, The President’s Cake, “Wuthering Heights,” Hamnet, Marty Supreme, and Sorry, Baby. There are maybe some light spoilers involved, if you care about that sort of thing. I usually don’t.

The Secret Agent (2025) (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho)

Outside of film circles and the Letterboxd Community™, I haven’t seen too much about this Wagner Moura vehicle, so I’m putting this at the very top of this list because I do not want you to miss it. Do you know how good this film was? If you don’t, it’s because you haven’t seen it yet, and if you haven’t seen it yet, literally what are you waiting for?! I mean, obviously I just recently saw it (was waiting for the theater release), but I happen to be very good at throwing stones from my personal glass house. Are you as good? Do you wanna take that risk?

The Secret Agent tells the story of Wagner Moura’s Marcelo (né Armando) as he drives his (charming!!) yellow beetle (seriously, why don’t I have a yellow beetle?) to Recife, the northeastern city of his birth, to seek temporary refuge from threatening forces only vaguely alluded to until dawning in terrifying clarity on the film’s last hour.3 Especially towards the beginning of the film, it feels as though we’ve intruded into Marcelo’s life, catching him at an inconvenient time as he negotiates the crisis in which he’s unwittingly found himself. If it takes us a while to understand the source of his troubles, it’s because he’s still figuring it out himself.

It takes some time—not very long—to understand that we’ve met Marcelo at a very Hiding From Fascists Time In His Life. It is 1977 when the film starts, a little beyond the halfway point of Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985). But of course you don’t know how much longer you’ve got to withstand when you’re going through it, do you? The boulder in front of you is all you see. Not to quote Joan Didion, but there comes a point when [surviving] every day is all there is.

This was an outstanding film, connecting past and present in a way that never feels forced, and showcasing supporting roles better than a lot of much-lauded performances I’ve seen this year (Dona Sebastiana and Fernandinho, the sky is literally yours!). And the following may not be a particularly sexy thing to say, but at 160 minutes, The Secret Agent was the best paced film I’ve seen in the last year. And yes, I’m including One Battle After Another in that ranking.

On the heels of last year’s I’m Still Here, we’re witnessing a really exciting moment in Brazilian cinema. Fueled by generational trauma and the annals of twentieth century Latin American history, sure, but art flows from the darndest pockets of darkness, doesn’t it?4

The President’s Cake (2025) (dir. Hasan Hadi)

I’ve written about my love of/for solo cinema dates a few times, most recently in November, when I said:

[T]he lure of a foreign film will always get me to leave my house. There’s just something about subtitles, I fear.5

This film wasn’t on my radar until I saw it on my cinema’s homepage, the image of a uniform-clad young girl sitting on a stone ledge, staring despondently into the distance while—inexplicably, tenderly—holding onto a rooster. A rooster!

Forgive my ignorance, but I had no clue that during Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, the government selected children from schools to bake the erstwhile president6 a cake for his birthday. And while as a euphemism enthusiast I did say selected, it does appear that the word best suited for the task may instead be conscripted. Set in 1990, a time when UN-imposed sanctions have already begun to deeply impact Iraqis’ access to the basket of goods, acquiring the materials and ingredients to bake said cake was a mission in itself.

And it is this mission that the film takes us on: Lamia, the schoolgirl tasked with the baking of Saddam’s cake, goes on a heroine’s quest alongside the requisite side characters that include the aforementioned rooster (Hindi is his name btw and do not forget!), her best friend and neighbor Saeed, her grandmother Bibi, and a gregarious, frequently life-saving driver.7 There are bureaucratic nightmares to contend with, yes, and petty abuse of small positions of power, along with a particularly nefarious character, but for the most part we are led to believe—maybe to hope—that Lamia will make it, whether by the grace of God, her own determination, or the kindness of strangers.

The President’s Cake was Iraq’s first Cannes entry, and my god, what a debut. Like Jafar Panahi choosing to shoot It Was Just an Accident (2025) in Iran despite the logistical, technical, and political obstacles, director Hasan Hadi insisted on shooting the film in Iraq, to illustrate the real country as opposed to a mere facsimile on a soundstage.

That was a crucial aspect for me. We had lots of offers of [sic] people saying: “Hey, we will fully fund this film, but we need to shoot this film outside Iraq.” And I was like: “Absolutely not.” And one of the reasons I wanted to shoot in Iraq is to show Iraq …. And I don’t think people will expect that Iraq looks like this, or has these kind[s] of visuals. But of course it was very challenging. (Variety)

This wasn’t a film light on casual tragedy and devastation by any means; I found myself deeply touched by the story. Hadi observes his characters and the country of his birth keenly, respectfully, and lovingly. You can’t help but emulate his perspective.

“Wuthering Heights” (2026) (dir. Emerald Fennell)

I don’t think I’ve gone into a screening with lower expectations since my eyes and ears were accosted by Emilia Perez back in December 2024. We all remember where we were, I assume, when that trainwreck took over. “Wuthering Heights” did not, to be clear, sink to EP’s subterranean levels. An impossible feat, after all.

To get this out of the way: Margot Robbie is too old to play Cathy, Jacob Elordi is too white to play Heathcliff, and they are both too spiritually and literally Australian (see: you can tell their vowels sound a little fucked and you could see them effortlessly excelling at most athletic endeavors) to play two morose and depressed people who grew up in the grey Yorkshire moors. Barring Alison Oliver’s turn as Isabella and Martin Clunes’s stomach-churning portrayal (complimentary) of Mr. Earnshaw, I can’t think of a single role that was well-cast.

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Further, a couple of personal caveats: I am a fan of the Emily Brontë novel that inspired this film8 and I have not enjoyed the bit of Emerald Fennell’s past work I’ve willingly exposed myself to.9

With that, then.

This was not a “good” “film,” to use the punctuation Fennell decided to employ when she titled the film not Wuthering Heights but “Wuthering Heights” like she’s a younger sibling with her hands half an inch from your face taunting I’m not touching youuu. I miss when people didn’t eschew maturity in favor of so-called whimsy. I’m tired of whimsy.

The director claims the title affectation is due to this being an adaptation based upon the feeling(s) she had when first reading the novel as a teenager.

All of the adaptations that have come before it are amazing. That’s absolutely why the title is in inverted commas. I’m aware of how personal the book is to so many of us, so I wanted to communicate as early as possible that it could only ever be an attempt to take a tiny piece of the book and make sense of it.

….

The starting point [of this adaptation] is imagining you’re a young girl who doesn’t really know what the Victorian or Georgian eras look like. We asked: if we were aliens given this text, how would we recreate this world? (W Magazine)

… Sure. Like, I’m sorry, but I lay the blame for all this in large part at the feet of tiktok therapists. This is what happens when we indulge every one of those “honor your inner child” videos instead of shaming people into growing up at least a little bit. Stop honoring, start de-arresting your emotional development. Jesus.

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I first started drafting this TWO YEARS AGO, and to be clear by “started drafting” I do mean this:

This might not surprise anyone who’s been familiar with my ever-evolving digital footprint for a while now, but I spent several years very much embroiled in the fashion blogging world, and Ferragni was one of the first girlies I followed. Like, I was regularly on her pink blog The Blonde Salad, a website coded by Satan himself, by the way, if I am remembering the comic sans text correctly; I was a teenager oohing and aahing over her outfits and fashion show appearances all over the world, reading her Italian and English copy about her little dog and her little Italian boyfriend and her charmed little life in Milan, back when she was still a law student and a fashion blogger.

And then when Chiara left her little Italian boyfriend1 and briefly, Italy, I kept up with the outfits and the life changes of it all, following along on Instagram as she moved to Los Angeles and expanded her brand, dated and then broke up with her hot photographer boyfriend; and in 2016, at this point in my early twenties and as such soon-to-be-lacking the benefit of the doubt an undeveloped prefrontal cortex gives a girl, I still remained a captive audience when she began her highly publicized relationship with Fedez, the Italian rapper of whose existence I am only aware because he and Ferragni went on a bit of a media blitz tour, got married, and had two children together (not necessarily in that order of chronology or priority).2

All of these comings and goings I observed over more than a decade. (We can all agree, I’m sure: a very good use of my time.)

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When in early 2020 Italy became one of the first major epicenters of the pandemic and Ferragni and Fedez (couple name Ferragnez, fyi to the uninitiated) took it upon themselves to become Inspiring™. He performed and streamed DJ sets from their balcony while she turned on her front-facing camera and spoke up about quarantining, wearing facemasks, and supporting hospital staff.

They were Good People, damn it, and they would document themselves being Good People! You think they were gonna let David Guetta end evil and racism all on his own? Absolutely not. Main Character Energy never sleeps, and neither did Chiara and Fedez.

Chiara Ferragni and Fedez Raise over 3 Million For Coronavirus Intensive Care Units (L'Officiel)

Italian govt enlists top influencers to promote COVID masks (Reuters)

They would spread the gospel of their own goodness even if it killed them. And, well. The road to hell is famously paved, isn’t it?

Which brings us, in a not-so-roundabout-way, to the gloriously named Pandorogate.

Miraculously, I was myself in Italy (see above) when, in December 2023, the Event that became known as Pandorogate fully descended upon us. And thank GOD. There are few things I appreciate more than being fluent in a local scandal. My little way of participating in the culture, if you will.

Of course if you’re a normal person, unencumbered by the heavy burden of Knowing Useless Things That Matter Only To Fellow Chronically Unwell People on the Internet, you’ll doubtlessly and logically ask yourself some version of the following questions: what was/is/could possibly be Pandorogate? How are we still talking about it today, over three years after its initial rumblings in December 2022? And most importantly: why should I care? These are important queries. These are queries worth getting into.

The evolution of Chiara

You should know that as part of her branding strategy, Ferragni had gradually pivoted from humble blogger to Businesswoman™ in the years running up to Pandorogate, and the next step in her evolution was Philanthrophist/Humanitarian™, in the vein of, I don’t know, Melinda Gates … Jane Goodall? Audrey Hepburn, if she’d had an Instagram account and no shame?

If you’re new to Ferragni World and this conceit sounds preposterous to you, believe me that I understand, but trust that I would not lead you astray. This is really the potential that Ferragni and the people orbiting her saw in the influencer—delusion, a necessary element of success, was built into the brand. You do unfortunately have to admire that. Would I, personally, have added some Icarian failsafes into the formula? Well, sure. But then we wouldn’t have a story to tell.

And the story, give or take a bit of oversimplification, is as follows:

In 2022, as part of her newish I-am-the-modern-Madonna-hear-me-roar3 persona, Ferragni decided to partner with Italian food company Balocco, wherein Balocco would sell a special edition of the traditional Christmas pandoro with the Chiara Ferragni branding and proceeds from the same would go towards the children’s research hospital Regina Margherita.

You see where we’re going with this.

(And if you’re thinking oh wow that must’ve been the first partnership of its kind for Ferragni, how fun, here’s where I tell you: no. This is a woman whose zeal to stamp her branding on consumer products ranging from Evian water bottles to Nespresso accoutrements to Pigna stationery to Oreos was only beaten by another, earlier Northern Italian’s enthusiasm for unwelcome flag-planting. Her licensing fervor was something to behold … probably by the Barbie (2020) marketing team.)

Pandorogate breaks, followed by a seemingly endless series of unfortunate events

As was first reported in December 2022 by Domani, something was slightly rotten in the state of Ferragni, for what was promoted as a purely—or at the very least, partly—philanthropic endeavor was seemingly little more than a marketing scheme, as it appeared the hospital had received a single one-off €50,000 donation, in contrast to the significantly higher proceeds from the Balocco-Ferragni campaign. Now I don’t know if you guys are up to date on your legalese, but in certain circles, this is sometimes called fraud. And wouldn’t you know it: the Italian state decided to have a little looksie.4

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