My husband officially joined the Air Force back in July, and he was in Basic Training for almost two months1, and is now in Tech School, so I’ve had a lot of time to myself. I’ve been working as much as possible and teaching myself more about Artificial Intelligence and other emerging technology, spending time with my friends and family, and I’ve been reading and watching movies and TV shows.
Here are some media highlights from recent times.
Books:
We The People: A History of the U.S. Constitution by Jill Lepore
I read Lepore’s These Truths back in 2020 (apt time for it), and We The People is even better. The Constitution is theoretically a changing document, but I think a lot of people on the Left see it as stifling (with regards to the Senate and electoral college) and generalized to a fault (with regards to the First Amendment and the varying definitions to free speech), and the funny thing is that they’re not wrong, but I don’t think they’d prefer the alternative. The fact is that nobody (except like, me and FIRE) really believes in free speech, they want to shut down their ideological opponents, albeit to different levels, but that doesn’t mean the country would be better off without the Constitution and First Amendment. In any case, this book is a timely and necessary addition to the American political canon.
Gwyneth: The Biography by Amy Odell
I really liked this book, despite the angry Goodreads reviews, and I thought it was great fun, and also really interesting in how it conceptualized Gwyneth the person versus Gwyneth the celebrity. I wrote about it more at length here, but generally speaking, I think Gwyneth is very content in the life she currently leads, existing in a metaphorical cocoon of sorts, free to conceptualize “normal” people as a theoretical construct and never having to care about real-world problems, but I also think it’s kind of a coping mechanism for fame. She seems kind of frozen in time in her late teens/early 20s, at about the time she met Harvey Weinstein, and the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that he didn’t stop at propositioning her. And, it makes me sad that Weinstein’s lurking in Gwyneth;s life didn’t end until she got pregnant with her daughter.
Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan
If Jack Schlossberg (Vogue correspondent and JFK’s grandson) runs for Jerry Nadler’s vacated Congressional seat (NY-11), we will be in the worst possible timeline, albeit one that we collectively might deserves. I liked this book, and it feels extremely timely given our current Secretary of Health and Human Services (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) is decimating public health and trying to make life even harder for pregnant women by claiming Tylenol has been linked to Autism (it has not). This book just makes it clear that yes, misogyny is inextricable from other forms of oppression but it’s also increasingly obvious that a lot of people, men and women, who are ostensibly left-of-center just don’t think misogyny is worth caring about in itself. These people genuinely seem to agree with Lana del Rey when she quipped in 20142, “For me, the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept. I’m more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what’s going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities” (although maybe not with Elon Musk’s endeavors nowadays), and it’s very tedious.
My Good Side: A Memoir by Scheana Shay
This book wasn’t as well-written as Stassi Schroeder’s books and Scheana Shay is kind of annoying, but her husband having an affair when she was pregnant with their daughter, and right after she had miscarried, makes me support her putting him through the ringer on live TV regardless. Brock Davies just has zero redeeming factors, and like, I have no idea what Scheana was even thinking marrying the guy when he has an ex-wife (that he probably domestically abused) and children in Australia, but nonetheless, he should probably be in stocks so we can all throw ripe tomatoes at him.
Assorted Romance Novels (quick takes):
The Earl That Got Away by Diana Quincy: Better than average for a romance novel written after 2020, but not as good as Quincy’s Her Night With the Duke
Spiral by Bal Khabra: I’m sorry but I simply do not believe that any straight man in his 20s knows how to take off a woman’s makeup when she’s wasted, like that’s just not a real thing that ever happens. Romance novels generally involve some suspension of disbelief but like, especially in contemporaries, there needs to be some sort of realism in the human behavior therein, and this ain’t it!
See Jane Score by Rachel Gibson: This book was published in pre Iraq War, Religious Right dominated America (January 28, 2003 to be exact) and honestly, it was so much more fun than the vast majority of contemporaries written nowadays! Speaking of the Religious Right, in this book, the heroine, Jane mocks Jerry Falwell, Religious Right icon, for saying the Teletubbies has gay undertones, and I laughed at that since the same Jerry Falwell made headlines about two decades later for being a cuck and swinger (with his wife and a bunch of Miami cabana boys)
I’m Looking For A Man in Finance by Sabrina Waldorf: I honestly think that writing books inspired by viral TikToks should be criminalized.
Only Earl in the World by Amalie Howard: Romance novels written after like 2020 are either totally closed-door, massively toned down in sexiness even from authors who previously wrote very sexy books pre-2020, or they’re performatively sexual to the extent it just seems silly, and it feels like the authors are just trying to shock rather than entertain . This book is in the latter category, which is a bummer because Amalie Howard is an engaging author with a great deal of potential.
Movies:
Superman (2025)
Superhero movies are hit or miss, and this one was really fun. David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan are fantastic, and Nicholas Hoult really has a talent for playing … evil bisexual men on Adderall (IYKYK). Also, I love Krypto (Jude does too).
The Wrong Paris (2025)
I generally like bad romantic comedies but this was pretty bad even by my standards. Miranda Cosgrove (aka Carly from iCarly and Megan from Drake and Josh) plays Dawn, and auditions for her favorite reality show, Honeypot, because she thinks it’s filmed in Paris, France (it’s filmed in Paris, Texas), and ends up falling for the show’s bachelor, Trey McAllen III. I don’t know what it was, but Dawn’s face just kept on distracting me because I’ve been watching Miranda Cosgrove on TV since I was a girl, and whatever procedures she’s done to her face make her look a bit uncanny valley. The guy who plays Trey is objectively attractive, but he has the same uncanny valley vibe to him, as if he wakes up every morning morning, applies a full face of makeup (which I, a 30-year-old woman, don’t even regularly do), and then, while looking in the mirror, meticulously paints on his washboard abs.
Mamma Mia! (2008)
This movie came out the same summer as The Dark Knight, and I saw it in theaters with my dad, but I watched Mamma Mia! at home on my DVD player (remember DVDs?), and I forgot just how much fun it is! Meryl Streep and Amanda Seyfried are luminous, and the dads are very fun like I’m way more of a Daniel Craig girlie when it comes to James Bond, but Pierce Brosnan in this movie is somehow way hotter than he was in Die Another Day (2002). My husband and I are actually going to Athens and the Greek Islands (TBD which ones) for our honeymoon next spring, and needless to say, I will be forcing him to recreate scenes from this movie3.
The Mummy (1999)
This movie inspired a theme park ride at Universal Studios, and it really feels like that. There’s a part in this movie where Evie is like, saying that she dreamed about mummies, and Rick’s like “You dream about dead guys?” and she’s like “Well yeah,” and honestly, that’s pretty much the summary of my marriage.
Dhaaruni:
Dylan:
TV Shows:
Scandal (2012)
I finally watched this show, and yeah, it gets really derailed around mid season 5, and I skipped around a fair amount in seasons 6 and 7, but man does it really hold up. It took me like half of the first season to really get into the show, and I honestly think that’s because it took me that long to come around to finding Tony Goldwyn (President Fitzgerald Grant) attractive. The final scene in season 3, with Fitz sobbing about his dead son while kneeling on the presidential seal, not even caring he’d won reelection and set to “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” really did it for me I’m not going to lie. And Olivia, Olivia Pope man, is honestly an unreal female character. Kerry Washington is both extremely talented and gorgeous4, and unguarded kudos to Shonda Rhimes making the protagonist of a primetime show a Black woman who has an affair with the white, Republican president of the United States, not shying from the elephant in the room Sally Hemings/Thomas Jefferson comparison, and still making her the unequivocal hero (and arguably the villain too).
The Royals (2015)
You know how the British Royal Family (BRF) wasn’t a fan of The Crown? I don’t remember what they said about The Royals if anything, but given that this fictional adaptation of the BRF is … not very flattering, I wouldn’t comment either. That said, between Queen Helena (played by Elizabeth Hurley, who Hugh Grant cheated on with a sex worker named Divine Brown back when I was an infant5) hooking up with her daughter, Princess Eleanor’s, bodyguard/boyfriend, Jasper, who’s sort of blackmailing her, and the antics of Princes Robert (faking his own death and maybe murdering his own father) and Liam (dating his brother’s girlfriend) and Eleanor (drugs, bisexuality, and aforementioned bodyguard), the show was great fun. Plus, I’ve always been very into the princess/bodyguard romance trope, which is in the queen/knight and its darker version, queen/huntsman family of romance tropes6. I would say I doubt the show creators would have leaned into the blackmail aspect if they’d realized from the beginning that Jaspenor was the best part of the show, but uh, given that the show creator is Mark Schwahn, I’m not sure about that.
All that said, many points made.
The Summer I Turned Pretty (2022)
I don’t like love triangles on principle, but I really liked this show! I initially started watching because I saw posts about how Lola Tung, who plays Belly, is fat (she is not) and I was like “Okay I’ll watch as a middle finger to those freaks,” but I really enjoyed it! As usual, people were unhinged about it, as they are with all media involving interracial relationships, but in general, I thought the show did a great job exploring how grief impacts the ones left behind.
Smallville (2001)
I’m only on season 2 in this rewatch but I watched this show before as a kid, and honestly, it’s better than I remember. Kristin Kreuk as Lana Lang is like totally luminous, and I don’t reel remotely guilty for finding Tom Welling as Clark Kent attractive given he was about my husband’s age at the beginning of the show’s run. Also, the theme song really hits, even almost 25 years later, and the episode with “Standing Still” by Jewel playing at the end made me cry.
Sex and the City (1998)
I’ve always been a big fan of this show, but on this rewatch I realized that this show, like Scandal after it, just would not fly today like it would be canceled in the very first season due to endless TikTok meltdowns about how evil all the main characters are, and I’m sure there would also be insane amounts of racism against Olivia Pope because being with a white man makes her white-adjacent and #problematic (I’d have said it was the rigging an election for a Republican but YMMV).
But regarding SATC, I think some of the Gen-Z/young woman hate for Carrie Bradshaw is because a lot of younger woman aspire to marry rich like Natasha did when she married Big, and Carrie is a symbol that marrying rich doesn’t automatically equate to happily ever after. Also, I think that people just reflexively hate on Carrie because she holds up a mirror to the parts of us we don’t always like, the vulnerable and pathetic parts, the parts that beg people, beg men, to love them.
Carrie isn’t even a habitual cheater or homewrecker, she just screws up once! I definitely don’t want to be friends with that lady who sleeps with married men as a lifestyle choice and justifies it, but everybody makes mistakes, even the most holier than thou of SATC viewers. However, in the words of Ariana Madix (from Vanderpump Rules), when people keep doing the same mistake, “These aren’t mistakes anymore, they’re pointed, choices. This is a pattern, a personality, this is who this person is.”
Plus like, people really seem allergic to understanding the difference between portrayal and endorsement like in the case of Sex and the City, the narrative indicates Carrie did something unequivocally wrong by having an affair with Big, it does NOT defend her, so it’s baffling but also interesting how mad this storyline and Carrie herself make viewers.
Links:
“The machine in the garden.” by 7
Social media is encroaching on what was a once a respectably literate walled garden — the machine is now in the garden**.
[…]
Today, I can barely tell anyone apart. Many of the Substacks I follow use these big, figurative words that don’t really make sense in an attempt to go viral, which on this platform means getting subscribers and notes and comments. It’s like there’s this internet language that “works” for engagement (literal language, but also sense of style, and a range of trending topics to touch upon) but it all coagulates together and creates a whitewashed, boring internet.
[…]
There are a lot of people trying to monetize noise.“How Problematic Women Become Pariahs” by
When a person is painted as disgusting, and held to be beyond the pale, there are powerful incentives for the rest of us not to tangle with them, lest we be deemed disgusting too. In part this is a reflection of how disgust tends to work: when one object that garners disgust, including moral disgust, is associated with another, the second gets tarnished—rendered gross by association. And that is how merely problematic women become moral pariahs. They are rendered indefensible because those of us inclined to come to their defense—noting their talents, their virtues, and holding that their flaws are not fatal—fear being subject to misogynistic moral disgust too if we do so.
“The top priority of progressive politics may be slipping out of reach forever” by Eric Levitz
Even if the party is only willing to tax the rich, it can still finance targeted anti-poverty spending. But absent an AI-induced productivity revolution, building a holistic welfare state will require persuading the middle-class to accept higher taxes.
“Polling is good” by
Polling is obviously flawed, but where would we be without it? Judge the value of surveys against the alternative, rather than the Almighty.
Determining what people truly believe is a core demand of democratic systems. Are elected representatives meant to learn about their constituents’ views solely through their conversations with the most-engaged voters? Should policymakers gauge public sentiment by looking at online posts artificially influenced and amplified by social media mobs? Are politicians supposed to assume that college-educated members of activist groups accurately represent the views of entire ethnicities?
“The Forever-35 Face” by Bridget Read
It’s true that there is something destabilizing about being among meticulously altered faces for a sustained period of time. They appear almost two-dimensional — like you should be looking at them on a screen. The handiwork is so subtle that the more you look, the less you can tell what has been moved, cut, and erased and the less tethered you become to the origin point: what a face modified by time and gravity should look like. Instead, the new faces appear as if they were always that way, belonging to an airbrushed species of another planet. “When you look at someone else with an elite facelift,” one surgeon says to me, “all you should be thinking is, How did you age better than me? The goal is you want to look genetically dominant to other people.”
Luckily, my husband has his phone back now after the cursed period that is Basic Training, and I can send him regular pictures of Esther (the cat) and can harass him via text and X-ter DM all the livelong day.
I enjoy Lana’s music (or rather, I LOVE Born to Die, the album and song, and can tolerate the rest), like I listened to “Every Man Gets His Wish” literally hundreds of times the summer of 2014 when I wore very close to the bone (metaphorically and literally), but it would be wonderful if prominent left-of-center figures (cough cough) didn’t seem to share her trite and very unintellectual view on feminism and politics in general.
Sorry @ Dylan, love you lots, always and forever.
My mom, who I got into this show, was like “Why is Olivia Pope wearing those heavy coats in the DC swamp? She’s very beautiful but should be wearing weather-appropriate clothing.”
I would love to know why information like this is ingrained into my head without having to look it up, but my brain has never really made much sense to me.
A funny bit of Dhaaruni Lore is that I was a pretty fandom-famous Jaime/Cersei shipper in Game of Thrones/ASOIAF fandom, and that couple is like a twisted version of the queen/huntsman trope, so it completely tracks given my lifelong predilections.
To be clear, this is absolutely the kind of newsletter Emily Sundberg is skewering in the linked piece, but given the vast majority of my pieces are longform and decidedly not in the format of “viral lists,” I’ve decided I get a pass.
Omg Scandal and a the Royals are the 2 most depressing shows about human nature I've ever seen.
Scandal (on purpose) for every single person making every single war crimes level terrible decision despite the consequences for not making those decisions being relatively trivial, and The Royals (by accident) for ending what is essentially a Rom-com with the establishment of a fascist monarchy!