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

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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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Below, in the order read, mostly using my little Bookshop affiliate links although as per usual I strongly suggest you visit your library and/or local independent bookstore, every book I read from January to March.

Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri) (1999)

I found this at the used bookstore in the last week of December, and not soon enough actually—Lahiri is one of those authors I was embarrassed about not having read yet. The short story collection came with me on my New Year’s trip, which meant that it was the last book I started in 2025 and the first one I finished in 2026. Gorgeous. You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to hear that I inhaled the sparse, occasionally hopeful, sometimes tragic, and always intimate stories about immigrants’ lives. The ebbs and flows and pain found in belonging to new and old places. Shocked. The fact that I read this on planes and airports and homes that weren’t mine only added to the experience of consuming Lahiri’s words for the first time.1

The Colony (Annika Norlin) (2023) (trans. Alice E. Olsson) (2025)

This recommendation came courtesy of , who I need to get on the newsletter soon because her reads are always thought-provoking and extremely up my alley.

Norlin is a Swedish author previously only known to me as the frontwoman of Hello Saferide, an indie pop group I spent a lot of my late teenage years listening to.2 In The Colony, Norlin has constructed a familiar world dealing with the trappings of modernity: burnout, an excess of technology, performing for social media, and the specific vulnerability that comes with seeking meaningful community. There’s a freaky little group that may or may not be a cult and there are near-Gatsby levels of jealously observing from afar and there is yoga overzealously practiced by white people.

A weird and unsettling and deeply Scandinavian novel. It was the perfect book to read in January, when it feels like everyone’s googling things like “how to be better at being alive.”

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye (Claire-Louise Bennett) (2025)

It was time, I suppose, to dip my toes into the CLB universe. I was moved to do so by , who’s written about Bennett extensively. The author seems to be a particular favorite among People Who Love Discussing Books—there’s something almost religious about the fervor of this appreciation. But I hate excluding myself from literary discourse, so of course here we are and of course I, too, have become a fan.

The novel tells the non-linear (what else) tale of a woman living as much in the past as she does in the present; as she grows accustomed to a new home, she is also continuously rehashing the highs and lows of a previous relationship with a much older man.

There’s a diaristic quality to Bennett’s style that will prove familiar to anyone who’s read enough millennial fiction.3 I might have more to say about it once I’ve read her other work, but in part because of sentences such as the following, I felt very at home in the story.

It’s not the least bit unusual, is it, to be mad about someone. No it isn’t. There’s a very long and illustrious tradition of it in fact. And that helped didn’t it, to think that the madness we felt was in fact part of a tradition.4

Quite self-indulgent, isn’t it.

Before I embarked upon this read, I admit I’d assumed the author had written a small mountain of books, but Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is only her third published work of fiction. There’s a sense of expectation among her readers and fans, as if they are getting in on the ground floor of an Annie Ernaux-type talent and preparing to claim I knew her when in a few years. And I understand it. I’m not quite ready to invest just yet (have very much added Pond and Checkout 19 to my list, do not you fret), but with Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, Bennett writes what feels like a quintessential millennial novel with elements of Ernaux, Sally Rooney, Clarice Lispector, and Patricia Lockwood’s styles, sprinkled with a bit of Woolf for good measure.

(On the last reference, there’s a persistent bit about the older man sending our protagonist flowers, and:

There came a point when I became fed up and critical of the arrangements the florist bought me, so I said to Xavier, quite tactfully, that I would prefer to go into the shop and choose the flowers myself.5

My marginalia on this page, written in faint pencil, says ok Mrs. D! Like it or not, Virginia’s room hasn’t been solely her own for a very long time.)

I do get the fascination. It makes for arresting prose. You’ll be hearing more from me on this.

The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri) (2003)

And then I saw a copy of Lahiri’s debut novel at my go-to bookshop, so I bought it. I really do need to stop accumulating books. The Namesake combined two of my favorite elements: Russian literature and the generational trauma of families who’ve immigrated from the global south to America. What is not to love!

In this, Lahiri tells the story of Gogol Ganguli, eldest son of Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, who’ve immigrated from Calcutta to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Born in America to parents who despite the distance remain staunchly committed to maintaining their Indian roots and traditions, Gogol resents almost everything about his upbringing—the many family functions he’s forced to attend, the disinterest in the arts and culture he perceives in his parents, and yes, his very name, inspired by the Russian author that, unbeknownst to him, changed the trajectory of his father’s life.

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Gogol’s choices in adolescence and young adulthood are an exercise in rebellion and dissatisfaction, prompted by a wish to belong in a more seamless manner than he’s had to bear. He wants to fold himself into America, eschewing the qualities that have made him stand out and absorbing those that’ll allow him to blend in. Until, of course, a sort of expected tragedy strikes and he is forced to reassess his attitude and, more importantly, his lifelong preconceptions about his parents.

Gogol knows now that his parents had lived their lives in America in spite of what was missing, with a stamina he fears he does not possess himself.6

As much as anything, the story is about Gogol’s journey away from the folly and bitterness of youth; it’s the slow process of letting go of his resentment, learning that it’s neither a total disavowal of nor an inauthentic attachment to his Indian roots that will give his life meaning. The trouble, of course, is that the journey is prompted not solely by time but by painful—if likely inevitable—mistakes.

I won’t pretend being an immigrant myself wasn’t conducive to my (pleasant!) experience with this novel, but I also think that anyone who’s had to grow up and Realize Things, to quote Kylie Jenner, would likely enjoy The Namesake just as much as I did.

Arquitectura Critica (Lorenzo Rocha) (2020)

What can I say about this, a brief survey of critical architecture that covers La Corbusier, Giancarlo de Carlo, Lacaton, Vassal, and Alejandro Aravena, other than: I bought it at a museum gift shop over a year before I finally finished it. I’ve been wanting to become more fluent in architecture as a subject, and while I wouldn’t say this alone got me there, it did expand my vocabulary and my references repertoire, which is juuuust enough to make me feel as if I occasionally know what I’m talking about when I look up at an intriguing building. It’s not nothing.

The Party (Tessa Hadley) (2024)

Discovering a friend has a compatible reading taste to yours is one of the best things that can happen to a person. Add to that a shared preference for physical over electronic copies of books and you’ve really kinda won the lottery. When uttered by someone whose taste in literature you trust, “I just finished this novel I think you might like” is a top ten sentence. The Party was recommended by one such friend is what I’m saying.

Anyway, this was a delightful novella reminiscent of Muriel Spark in both style and substance—in fact, I had to keep flipping back to the copyright page to make sure Hadley had actually written this in 2024 and not, as my mind repeatedly tried to convince me, the 1950s. The charming coming-of-age story set in post-war Bristol, coupled with brisk prose that doesn’t take itself too seriously and sisters that love but don’t very much like each other, was an ideal rainy day read.

The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton) (1920)

Some years back I read a collection of Wharton’s New York stories and until last month, that was all I’d read of the author. If I may be allowed to dabble in radical honesty very briefly, I’ll admit that my main impetus for finally reading The Age of Innocence was wanting to watch Scorsese’s 1993 film adaptation of the same, which I refused to do before reading the book. Bit silly, I know.

Well, of course I loved it. I had no doubt I would, being raised as I was on the joys and virtues of the nineteenth century novel.7 I mean, a love story doomed by a tragic adherence to the unflinching if unspoken rules of the upper class will do it for me every single time.

Wharton is also deeply, darkly funny. Her sense of irony jumps off the page, balancing the plot’s occasionally tragic turns. Like:

“Women ought to be free – as free as we are,” he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.8

And:

“It seems so to me,” said his wife, as if she were producing a new thought.9

Do you see what I mean? Suffering is so much easier when there’s humor involved.

In Innocence as well as in her short stories, Wharton appears to consistently poke fun at the notion of America as synonymous with freedom, noting with mocking abandon all the ways in which we are beholden to and constrained by the very customs we pretend to have escaped.

It was fascinating reading this novel while everyone was watching and commenting on the JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette series—I couldn’t help seeing the similarities between Bessette and Wharton’s tragic heroines; how so often, the cost of belonging and being accepted by a tightly-knit and self-regulated social class is the loss of oneself. Try as one might to juggle the two, there exists an inherent impossibility in obeying competing masters.

Walking on the Ceiling (Ayşegül Savaş) (2019)

Long-time readers will recall I read (and loved) Savaş’s The Anthropologists this past autumn. I lent that novel to a friend, and the same friend gifted me Walking on the Ceiling for my birthday last month. The enjoyment of literature is a virtuous circle, etcetc.

The novel toggles constantly between past present and future, because of course it does, what else would a novel published by a millennial in 2019 do, and tells the story of Nunu, a young Turkish woman who moves to Paris in search of meaning, purpose, a sense of belonging.10 Savaş follows Nunu almost as if from a careful distance, like she’s aware of her protagonist’s reticence and self-isolation and doesn’t want to spook her by poking too intimately into the details of her life.

When in the last third of the novel we do finally approach and begin to unravel the sources of Nunu’s loneliness and dissatisfaction, it is with the cautious understanding that whether intentionally or from a subconscious desire to protect herself, Nunu may not have been entirely honest with herself about the role she’s played in her own unhappiness. There’s a recognition that we are, at best, unreliable narrators of our own lives, and that examining our memories may either cement our deceptive understanding of ourselves or painfully disclose our true—and flawed—nature.

You see, the thing about Savaş’s writing is that I feel personally attacked whenever I read it. Take, for instance:

One time he referred to Paris as a “sad and forgiving city” and I did not ask him why he thought this. I felt that this sort of curiosity for facts would betray the rules of our correspondence.11

The element of self-sabotage is a heavy presence over the pages of this novel. And I apologize in advance for what I’m about to say, but in its treatment of memory and childhood, in its Parisian setting, in its serious chronicle of an all-consuming relationship with someone of whose affection you remain uncertain … it is terribly Proustian.12 This is not a bad thing, but it is A Thing.

To be clear, I very much enjoyed it, even if it was a kick in the teeth. If you’ve also read The Anthropologists (2024), I think you’ll find that in the five years between Walking on the Ceiling and The Anthropologists, Savaş managed to locate a glimmer of optimism and/or hope. I’m excited to read more of her work.

We Do Not Part (Han Kang) (2021) (trans. e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris) (2025)

It was only about a year ago that I read Greek Lessons, my first novel from Han Kang, and since then I’ve been steadily making my way through her works. An edifying—if emotionally devastating—project.13

Reading Kang always makes me feel like I know next to nothing about Korean history, which in fairness, is mostly true. It’s embarrassing. A week-long study in revealing my ignorance to myself. I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia whenever I finish one of her novels. This, for instance, is the Wiki entry for Jeju Island, where most of We Do Not Part takes place and where, between 1948 and 1949, the state (with the West’s help, ahead of the official start of the Korean War) massacred between 14,000 and 30,000 people suspected of being communist sympathizers in what the South Korean government in 2003 concluded was a genocide of its people.14

In We Do Not Part, Kang uses history in the same way some authors utilize homes as their own characters and plot devices (apropos of nothing, I’m currently reading Brideshead Revisited). The lines between generational and national trauma are blurred, helping to explain why Inseon, our protagonist Kyungha’s eccentric friend, lives a secluded life in Jeju Island and why she has chosen the documentary subjects she’s completed thus far and why she counts a small bird, Ama, as her only companion. Why following a terrible injury, she asks Kyungha to urgently make the long trek from Seoul down to Jeju and save Ama.

As Kyungha rushes to Jeju in the middle of a snowstorm, the history of the island and of Inseon’s family seeps into the pages like blood from an open wound. It’s not sentimental, the narrative; there’s something direct about it, as if there’s nothing to do but tell the story as it happened. It doesn’t cheaply tug at the reader’s heartstrings. Somehow, this makes it worse.

I knew about the organization, how back in 1948, after the first government was established, whole swathes of people were categorized as left-wingers in need of education and made to join the [Bodo] League so that they might benefit from its purported goal to convert, protect and guide…. Entire families were enrolled as well, meaning its ‘members’ included women, children and the elderly, and when war broke out in the summer of 1950, everyone on the list was preventively detained, then summarily executed. The estimated number of people killed and buried in secret around the country is said to be between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand.15

There’s a darkness and a tactility I now recognize in Kang’s storytelling. It’s imbued in her characters, in the way they speak and act and think. Her novels are at once an acknowledgment that tragedy leaves a mark and a patient digging into their inciting events. Not so much healing as understanding.

I wasn’t surprised to feel drained by the time I turned the last page, although the situation wasn’t as dire as when I finished The Vegetarian, a novel that demanded three to five days of desperate introspection. Much like she does her characters, Kang has an ability to render her readers a vessel for collective pain. One wonders, reading her prose, if shared pain makes it more bearable or serves to simply multiply the suffering. Maybe, by virtue of diminished loneliness, multiplied suffering inherently becomes more tolerable. Hard to tell.

A Far Cry from Kensington (Muriel Spark) (1988)

I mentioned Spark above, and probably made it sound like I was some big expert. In fact, before this I’d only ever read The Girls of Slender Means (1963). I remember being charmed by it—enough, apparently, to recall Spark’s distinct style when first encountering a different author’s Sparkian prose several years later—but as my first exposure happened to coincide with the height of Covid, it’s likely that I was more concerned with surviving (spiritually, physically, emotionally, etc.) than in becoming a 27-year-old expert in the eccentric Scottish author.16

Anyway, it was indeed Hadley’s The Party that made me want to get back to Spark, so when I spied A Far Cry from Kensington at the bookshop, I snapped it up. And predictably, I was once again delighted. The story of Mrs. Hawkins, a young widow in post-war London who constantly finds herself in the unwelcome position of being asked for advice, whether at the rooming-house she lives or the publisher where she works. While not as meddlesome, there’s an air of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge in the somewhat tragicomic comings and goings of Mrs. Hawkins and her often-unfortunate environs.

It’s a strange little book, slightly self-righteous almost in the vein of Louisa May Alcott but in a way that’s drolly aware of itself and the lessons it’s trying to impart. See, for instance:

I enjoy a puritanical and moralistic nature; it is my happy element to judge between right and wrong, regardless of what I might actually do. At the same time, the wreaking of vengeance and imposing of justice on others and myself are not at all in my line.17

Whenever I read strange and enjoyable little books I find myself wanting to know more about the author responsible for such a feat. Suffice it to say it did not surprise me much to learn that Spark converted to Catholicism in adulthood. I’ve added Frances Wilson’s Electric Spark (2025) to my little list; if you’re interested, wrote a wonderful review of the Spark biography last year.

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And of course, I keep chugging along with The Brothers Karamazov. You’ll be happy to know I’m a hundred or so pages past the midpoint, so things are looking up (for me, if not Mitya).

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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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I mention this because the first few months of the year feel a little like getting punched in the face. At least in terms of needing to lie down for extended periods of time.

Like, my forced coexistence with the month of February baffles me. Granted, I don’t see an alternative other than a self-imposed coma, but it is laughable that every year the sun takes a full month off and we’re expected to simply keep trucking along. I’m never more on the verge of a catastrophically life-altering decision than I am during those 28 days. Don’t even get me started on fucking leap years.3 Like oh we couldn’t add an extra day to October? November, even? October 32nd has such a gorgeous ring to it, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t even like even numbers.

A bit of a catch-up today, then, since we’ve finally emerged from the doldrums of winter.

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It doesn’t feel like it because I started writing this potentially a month ago, based on my level of attachment to this open tab, but February’s been done for a bit. Now that it’s not raining every second of every day, I’ve resumed my obsessive little walks. Then, once a week, I’ve been semi-regularly going to trivia with the same friend who asked about my face’s experience getting punched.4 The other day I found out that one of the trivia team members was born in 2001, like fully the space odyssey year, and I felt like Methuselah. Sorry, I just wasn’t aware 2001 was a real year on which people started their lives.

My birthday was this past weekend. I was born before 2001. I celebrated turning one year older with new and old friends, just enough indulging to prompt minimal to moderate regret in the morning, and the kind of (literal) déluge Louis XV predicted would follow his demise. All in all, a success.5

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Speaking of aging: happy belated anniversary to this newsletter about people’s growing lack of directional awareness. Enough time has now passed that I can finally reveal I wrote it directly following a (perfectly nice) date confusing the city’s two main arteries when walking me home. Sorry to this man.

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I’ve taken up an obnoxious little photography hobby, which is funny because once a month or so I’ll get my photos developed and send them out to my friends and they have to pretend they’re good and not wildly out of focus or overexposed or framed by a drunk toddler on the run. I’ll probably write more about this soon.

Been reading a lot and feeling weird about my body, so you know, same old, same old. Back in October I wrote about how skinny everyone’s getting and how many weight loss ads I kept getting on Instagram and I had some pushback because famously you can only publicly comment on diet culture if you’ve been fat. Lol. Anyway, I watched most of the Oscar nominated films but I haven’t kept up with the awards ceremonies too much because quite frankly, the shrinking bodies on the red carpets have been insanity-inducing. Like, we all see the jutting collarbones, yes? There are a couple of actresses in particular who’ve been steadily disappearing under our noses and every time someone comments on their gowns (beautiful gowns!) without acknowledging the overwhelming thinness, my right eye twitches. I won’t write any more about this.6

On books, though. I’m doing the year-long The Brothers Karamazov readalong hosted by . The novel is broken up into twelve books; theoretically, we’re meant to be reading a book a month, and I can tell you I appreciate the symmetry of such a plan, while also telling you that I’ve just begun the eighth book. Antisocial behavior, I know, but the thing is this is my fourth time starting this massive tome and I am determined to actually finish it this year. Slow reading will not get me there, I fear—my inertia has to work in tandem with habit.

Other recent reads of note: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (I was deeply embarrassed not to have read it sooner, a feeling that only grew when I turned the last page … wealthy women drawing from a deep reservoir of literary talent … a lot of today’s girlies could stand to learn something, I’ll say that!); Ayşegul Savaş’s masterful Walking on the Ceiling (I’m working on becoming an expert on literary—and actual—millennial ennui, making Savaş required reading); and Tessa Hadley’s slim The Party (despite being published in 2024, it reminded me so much of Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means (complimentary), which in turn reminded me I need to urgently catch up on the Sparkian oeuvre). I’ve read other things, too, a girl can’t be expected to subsist on Russian literature alone—I’ll write more about it soon.7

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Ramadan ends this week which means that for the first time since February I won’t have the benefit of my best friend waking up early enough to respond to my morning crashouts. Long distance, man. If you’re lucky enough to live in the same time zone as your best friend, count your BLESSINGS. Because sometimes by the time she wakes up my existentialism has evaporated and frankly, what is the point of a normal conversation with one’s oldest friend.

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I’d planned to end this little entry telling you the story of the barista who hates me for reasons I’ve thus far been unable to identify and how being openly disdained by a stranger despite being at worst unobjectionable and at best a fucking delight has added a bit of a thrill to my life, but I’ll save it for next time. Something to look forward to.

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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.

“I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this anymore.’ All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there,” Chalamet added, to laughter from the crowd. (People.com)

Given how we’ve seen the comment play out in the real world over the last few days, no fragment has been funnier to me than “to laughter from the crowd.”

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You might be wondering why these two were out there acting like the New Hampshire primaries were around the corner. A town hall, I swear to god. A quick google search reminded me that McConaughey1 is currently a professor at UT Austin, which, like, sure. I guess the man needs an occupation now that Texas has elected Glen Powell as its new Hollywood representative. And Chalamet has not been shy about his willingness to take any available opportunity to vie his peers’ official recognition.

Above all, these are two men who love to hear themselves talk. You can hear the self-adoration in the palpable absence of silence running through every singular frame of this hour-long town hall.

Never forget, of course, that McConaughey is someone who in his 2014 Oscars acceptance speech saved his last nugget of gratitude for his hero: his future self. And you know what, less than a decade later he would ink a $10 million a year deal with Salesforce to act as the company’s “creative adviser and TV pitchman” (I’m not making up these titles … it’s like he swallowed an entire team of junior McKinsey consultants). The actor’s hero (himself) bravely turned a blind eye to the thousands of employees Salesforce has laid off in the last five years. Greed will make fools of us all. Sadly, being foolish to begin with won’t exempt you. Becoming a bigger fool is always an option.

But anyway, back to Timmy, who literally could’ve sat there and ate his food but instead chose to succeed in the awesome task of brimming with even more overconfidence than Matthew McConaughey.

There’s something so refreshingly honest about self-sabotage. Do you guys remember Karla Sofía Gascón’s trainwreck Oscars campaign from last year, a situation somehow altogether separate from the filmographic atrocity that was Emilia Pérez? God, what a trip. If you’ve excised the memory from your brain (my congratulations), this was when a simple walk down Gascón’s twitter feed revealed that from around 2015 until 2020, the Best Actress nominee had appointed herself as a hate speech ambassador. For, btw, not against.2

Obviously, provided you’re not a guest at a Frasier Crane dinner party, comments against ballet and opera are not hate speech. But the Icarian attitude is, I think, something that Gascón and Chalamet share. With the former, it was the carelessness of not even bothering to delete old tweets of a most shocking and hateful nature; with the latter, the apparent belief that the weight of his talent and charisma could offset the on-camera expression of disparaging, offensive, and untrue remarks.

It’s funny because no one’s really out to get Chalamet; in fact, I’d wager that many of us harbor something between a neutral and a begrudgingly positive opinion of him. Just last week, I wrote that:

It feels unfortunate to have a soft spot for Timothée Chalamet, mainly because of his Frenchness. But I do, and I can’t help appreciating his earnest and open dedication to self-discipline and, to use his word, greatness.

Alas, I spoke too soon. Within minutes, he’d almost certainly ruined his chances of standing on that stage, reciting the acceptance speech I just know he’s been practicing for years, all because he couldn’t keep his intrusive thoughts from escaping his mouth. You kinda have to laugh, no? And btw, none of that oh, he’s young apologia—he’s skinny, but he’s 30.

Hubris, man. This is why a little insecurity goes a long way. It’s hard to be hoisted by your own petard if you possess a healthy shred of self-doubt. I know I frequently cite delusion as a necessary component of success, and I stand by that, but there are levels. It’s a hard balance to strike, but sturdily believing in yourself without losing all your self-awareness is key.

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Because it’s not really the point, I don’t even think it’s necessary to denote how very much people do care about the opera and ballet. I mention Center Stage (2000) on a weekly basis, Tchaikovsky soundtracks more of my days than not, and last month when my brother and I walked by a hair salon called Figaro, we both spontaneously began singing per un barbiere di qualitá-di qualitá-di qualitá. These are, you understand, universal experiences.

An art form being less accessible than others—largely by virtue of poor funding—does not make it culturally irrelevant, and it behooves anyone who calls himself an artist to recognize this, not least because you never know which way the pendulum of access might swing.

By now I think you all know how difficult it is for me to not speak of anti-intellectualism and how a growing societal disdain for intentional erudition is making us all meaner and dumber, two of the worst things a society already in collapse can become. So to save us from a well-trodden tangent, I won’t speak on anti-intellectualism.

That being said.

It is wild to be someone dedicated to the arts and simultaneously employ a rampant lack of curiosity regarding your fellow artists. Chalamet has waxed poetic about his path toward greatness, but it’s not a pursuit that can go very far so long as your blinders remain in place. I’d argue that especially when it comes to the arts, effort and hard work can never be complete when it focuses solely on the individual without incorporating the collective.

I mean, not to bring another problematic TC to the table, but Tom Cruise, whose advice Chalamet received a few years ago, would never. Tunnel vision is well and good when it pertains to building discipline, but if you care about the well-being of your industry and the long-term development of your craft (and these might be the only things Cruise truly cares about), it becomes necessary to stray beyond the strict confines of your own success. This is perhaps one of the reasons why McConaughey’s main claim to fame in the last decade is a starring role in Salesforce ads.

The spirit of solidarity was not coursing through Chalamet when he decided to ignore all his media training and disparage ballet and opera, two fields whose talent barrier to entry is frankly much higher than screen acting. Respectfully!

You have to give a fuck about your peers. That’s the whole point. Did the strikes teach that man nothing?

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Lastly: let this not be interpreted as a defense of the Kardashian-Jenners because lol can you imagine, but I will say I do find it interesting how quick people are to blame Kylie Jenner’s influence for this faux pas. As if Chalamet isn’t capable of being annoying, short-sighted, and hubristic all by himself. It may be Women’s History Month but do let me be the first to say: give a man his due.

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I wouldn’t say that Chalamet was a favorite to win the Oscar prior to his little comments (personally, I think it’s between Michael B. Jordan and Wagner Moura), but he wasn’t not in the conversation. Now, though … well. This is why method acting, beyond being obnoxious, is also dangerous. Marty Mauser may have had whatever the Safdie version of a happily-ever-after is, but it seems unlikely that Chalamet will. At least this awards season.

It appears, then, that Timmy’s climb to Thespian Olympus shall have to be delayed. Tant pis, babes.

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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.

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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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Part of this little fixation I’ll chalk up to something that is not in t…

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But then Brooklyn Beckham, a person I’m only aware of due to the twin powers of alliterative names and famous parents, decided to open his little Notes app and call a shockingly loud j’accuse on his family. And you know what, I’m not too proud to say that I sat up. I did! Like all of us, I’ve been despairing as ICE has fully assumed its Gestapo identity and wreaked havoc on Minnesota and the rest of the country; waking up every day wondering what nation America will be attacking or threatening to attack today; and losing my mind as public health continues its downward slippery slope led by RFK Jr’s wormed-out brain.

So yes, when a low-stakes scandal makes its way into my algorithm, you best believe I’m gonna be paying attention. A family feud made up, on one side, of a former footballer who’s been much better at branding than he ever was at footballing1 and on the other, his first-born son (I’m the eldest boy!) who at 18 years old released a photography book and unironically captioned one of said photos “i like this picture – it’s out of focus but you can tell there’s a lot going on” and his billionaire heiress wife whose Instagram bio reads “actor/writer/director” and “dog activist.”

Here, by the way, are Brooklyn and Nicola Peltz Beckham, and I am begging you to open the post so you can fully appreciate the outfits Express saw fit to dress these two in:

I mean. Absolutely. No chaser required. Straight into my veins. Call me Niles Crane’s brother because babes, I’m listening.

Call it what you will (mental illness), but I do love a pop culture event that sets my group chats aflutter. Can’t help it. I grew up reading the first half of every tabloid magazine to kill time at the grocery store checkout line and I’m afraid one never outgrows this particular penchant to stay current on insignificant matters. After all, if I had to pinpoint the exact genesis of this newsletter, I’d be hard-pressed to find a more accurate one than the Publix checkout line circa 2004.

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Anyway. After briefly disassociating and spending 1-7 hours immersed in Beckham World earlier this week, I remembered that I’d written about the family back in 2023, a few weeks after their Netflix documentary had come out.

And I was mostly complimentary!

“Quite organized,” says Beckham as he shows Fisher his meticulous closet and planned outfits for the week. A reminder that anyone successful in a highly competitive field is at least a little bit insane. They have to be.

Mostly. I did spend quite a bit of time extolling the virtues of their brand-building, which, fittingly enough, now seems to be the target of Brooklyn’s criticism.

There are few celebrities, in my view, who have been able to pivot and curate their brands as precisely as they have. The sheer existence of this documentary, about a footballer whose contributions to the sport were arguably more (I say this with love) exogenous than anything else, is proof enough of the Beckham brand’s strength.

Would it be going too far to call me prophetic? I leave that up to you. What I mean to say is: I was ready to meet this moment.

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Here are a couple of Brooklyn’s stories:

I was going to add all of the screenshots, but there are six stories, and frankly my laziness/pride runneth over. Needed to get Marc Anthony in there, though … I just know he’s having the time of his life as a side character in this saga.

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There’ve been rumblings of an intra-family feud for years now, but this is the first time they’ve been confirmed by a primary source. And therefore, as the huge fans of journalistic integrity we all are, this prompted a proper outpour of theory-building, some of it naturally verging on the conspiratorial. What are we if not human?2

I am utterly entranced, possibly bewitched (body and soul), by the very notion of airing one’s family’s dirty laundry out in public via Instagram story. Whatever the truth might be, to the extent a single truth exists, there’s a certain absence of charm to revealing your version of it on social media to people whose interest in you could best be described as morbid. The exact opposite of a je ne sais quoi, I fear. I say this understanding that nowadays there are fewer and fewer alternatives to social media when it comes to breaking news (“breaking” “news”) of the personal sort, and yet! The possession of fame and fortune should afford one the means to at the very least affect, if not actually master, a wee bit of discretion. No?

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Anyway, one of those books was Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation, translated by Susan Bernofsky. The author’s popular Kairos had only just recently been released in its original German and would not be translated until 2023, so I knew all of Nothing™ about Erpenbeck or her style. Really, I’d only added Visitation to my cart because it was a staff recommendation—something else I can never resist.

The slim novel, which I read mostly on the couch as my parents’ then-new dog napped on my lap, told the story of a house in the countryside, just outside of Berlin.

That’s a simplified way of looking at Visitation, sure, but simple is good, sometimes. It’s the tale of a house and its inhabitants over time, starting from the nineteenth century and traveling all the way to the late twentieth century. And like, I don’t know how many of you are history buffs … but Germany went through a lot of ch-ch-changes during this very specific time. All the while, the novel tells us, through every birth and every death and every joy and every tragedy, this house in the outskirts of Berlin remained, quietly observing the tides of time, absorbing the details of people’s lives into its foundation. Steady.

Visitation crept into my mind almost immediately following the start of Sentimental Value, probably my favorite film of 2025 and Jonathan Trier’s latest (and successful) attempt to emotionally undo me.

Now, I realize saying the new Norwegian film reminded me of a semi-obscure German book from 2008 makes me sound like a bit of a pretentious tool. I’m not unaware.

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How-e-ver. (1) Sorry that I’m well-read and (2) Drawing the connection between the two was inevitable, and not only because both stories and their bleak northern climates provoked in me short-to-medium term existential crises. No. There are other reasons. Most importantly: just like in Visitation, the home is where Sentimental Value begins, and it is arguably where it ends.1 There is no conflict, no growth, and no resolution without it.

The house is key to the story and to the family saga in which we are embedded. Indeed, Trier makes its importance and symbolism almost too obvious to the audience early on, personifying it in the very first scene via Nora’s childhood essay, written from the point of view of the house, with its scratched floors, groaning hinges, and its observant, gradually cracking walls.

It is, to be clear, a beautiful house. One quite worthy of being personified.

Through Sentimental Value, Trier suggests that our willingness and our ability to create a healthy life outside of our first home—and by extension, our first family—becomes a central pillar of our development, emotional maturity, and happiness. It’s a continuation of the themes he’s navigated in his earlier films, including Oslo, August 31 (2011) and The Worst Person in the World (2021), in which the family home is depicted as, if not the scene of the crime, a significant source of family and self-conflict.2

By showing us the intertwining lives of Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) and his daughters Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, whose Best Supporting Actress campaign I’ll be running) and Nora (Renate Reinsve), Trier explores the idea that a home, rather than solely being a place of safety, can also bottle up unavoidable generational trauma, and there may come a point where the only way of escaping said trauma is by physically escaping that home and not just making, but committing to a new one. (A fun holiday watch for the whole fam, btw!)

Spoilers for Sentimental Value (2025) ahead.

Following the set piece3 that is Nora’s childhood essay, we find ourselves in the present, but still at the house. This time, it is the scene of a funeral: Agnes and Nora’s mother has died. A psychoanalyst who raised her daughters on her own after Gustav skipped town, she was the last person to live in the house she once shared with her family. It is this estranged artist father’s surprise appearance at the otherwise sunny funeral that triggers—or highlights, depending on your perspective—the slowly unraveling dysfunction of the family’s three remaining members.

Just like any important character, the house finds itself with a backstory. What we are told is this:

The house is where Gustav’s mother grew up, where she was taken from for anti-Nazi propaganda during the war, and where she returned after being tortured and held prisoner for two years; it is where she became a wife and a mother and where she took her own life when her son was still a small child. In the aftermath of this tragedy, Gustav and his father left Norway (and by extension, the house) and headed to Sweden, where Gustav lived more or less permanently until he in turn became a husband and a father, settling with his wife and children in the same house where his mother committed suicide.4

I mean, not to give mitigating factors too much credit in excusing shitty parenting, but … is it any wonder that he eventually abandons the home (this particular home) and his family? Let’s look at the material!

In such a trauma-filled collection of walls, was there any real hope for a happier alternative? It’s the question we spend a little over two hours pondering.

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I’ve always been viscerally fascinated by (see: intensely jealous of) people who spent their entire childhoods in one place. There’s something so appealing about faint dashes of growing heights scratched on a fading white wall. To have not just parents and siblings to witness your evolution from child to adult, but a place. To turn to someone at the end of the night and tell them, I’m going home, and know exactly what that means.

But then, I think, maybe to make myself feel better, how hard must it be to outgrow a place like that?

A place that has observed every version of you and that remains within shouting distance means that your worst, lowest version is never too far behind. She can always be reverted to. In this way, a home isn’t merely a shelter—it can be a prison, too. It can hold us back. Don’t we feel a version of that every time we go home for the holidays and temporarily become our bratty teenage selves again? Don’t we hate ourselves a little bit then?

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First of all, every time I check my phone or open a new tab on my little laptop I become aware of a new Worst Thing That Has Ever Happened In the History of Things. So that’s one thing I can point to when people are like oh why do you feel weird. Well! Look at the material! You feel good? What is wrong with you?

There is no second of all, not really, but famously my grandmother died three Decembers ago. Luckily she waited to perish until I had a newsletter so I could exorcise my anguish in public with all of you. One of the many ways in which she exhibited consideration. I try to do the same with my family and friends, but sometimes I think I’m too young to be as nice as I might one day become. I still let frustration get the better of me once, if not thrice, a week, and I gotta tell you, I don’t love the idea that there are outstanding life lessons from which I’ll learn to be patient. I hate the vague threat of a personal Aesop’s fable, never mind many of them.

Anyway, dead loved ones. Once in a while I get hit (see: ambushed by my memory) with the realization of all the things I haven’t heard since my grandmother passed away, like the nickname that only she used to call me and the way she said “que churro” when she saw a handsome man on the screen or, quite frankly, walking down the street. No one I talk to regularly is old enough to use the word churro like that, and I just think we should bring it back. In fact, I might make it a resolution for 2026. You heard it here first.

(I’m paywalling the rest of this because being vulnerable on main is more of a spring/summer thing and because this is my last appeal of the year to convince you to upgrade your subscription, if you haven’t yet and you’re able to do so. Either way, I’ll be back with at least one free post before 2025 is over, but still: Happy holidays, merry merry, etc.)

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