My most popular rec of all time is not some gorgeous piece of longform journalism or a stunning documentary, but last week’s handheld fan. So here’s an encore for the ventilation nuts: Duux’s tower fan is a third of the price and twice as good as the Dyson. You’re welcome.
Under the paywall today: two engrossing podcast interviews; a galvanizing interview with a best-selling author; a delicious new David Sedaris essay; scurryfunges and wankapins (not a typo); when men become mean girls; and how to say no when you want to say yes.
Quick hits:
How long til South Korea’s dopamine sites hit the West? They scratch the itch, but can they purge the urge…
This blister stick saved my foot bacon. The key is to rub all over shoes and feet
Nearly a quarter of Brits say they “react negatively” when someone rings the doorbell without texting first (via The Week.) Of all the friction-free madness
My no.1 salad dressing after much experimentation: miso, tahini, sesame oil, soy, lime juice, balsamic, dijon mustard, sriracha. Vary quantities according to preference (also rec: Ruby Tandoh on salads)
It might look like a giant blue prophylactic, but Solomon’s ‘soft flask’ is the three gulp solution for a tiny handbag
I rip the kids quiz out of the newspaper every week. It’s written by Molly Oldfield, author of the gorgeous Everything Under the Sun series.
Talk about perk of the job! This week I received a box of Brief Encounters, a collection of 52 classic novellas and short stories, designed to be read in one sitting. There’s been a real yen for classic books around the 100 page mark this year. Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men is a current BookTok fave (despite being published almost 30 years ago), while Women Without Men by exiled Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur has just been translated into English, 37 years after publication - it’s longlisted for this year’s International Booker. And let’s not forget Helen DeWitt’s impeccable The English Understand Wool. It’s a smart move on publishing’s part - if only cinema could follow suit….
Unlike so many of these tasteful reissues (love to look at them, rarely open them) this a great edit: there are so many novellas I had been meaning to read, and the covers are LUSH. Perfect handbag size, too. Here are the five I’m starting with:
Passing by Nella Larsen (which Rebecca Hall adapted for film in 2021, and Emma Dabiri wrote about for What Writers Read)
Things: A Story of the Sixties by Georges Perec (the inspiration for Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection)
Recitatif by Toni Morrison (which I had somehow never even heard of)
Laura by Vera Caspary (a “classic early noir”)
Sunday’s Children by Ingmar Bergman (an author I’ve never read and long wanted to).
This piece by the late Jenny Diski from the LRB archives about who is allowed to write about depression (a rec from Eva Wiseman, herself the author of a vg interview with Katie Price1) still feels startlingly relevant. Using the medium of Liz Jones (and her long-term, marmite ‘misery’ column for the Daily Mail), Diski examines why being permanently maudlin is less acceptable than being up and down; the subjectivity of a difficult life; and how snobbery distorts our idea of ‘good’ writing.
“It’s quite possible that some or most of Jones’s descriptions of herself and her life have little to do with reality, but that doesn’t automatically make them unfelt or fabrications or out-and-out lies. We fit our facts into our feelings, and our memories obediently adjust to reflect those feelings back at us as recollection. And even if they are fabrications and lies, that doesn’t make them uninteresting. The most any writer can commit to is some sort of coherent narrative.”
A clever, nuanced piece that I came back to and read all over again the next day.
I love Laura Marling’s new album of kids songs so much that I have found myself asking Google Home to play it… when on my own.
I have joined the swollen ranks. By which I mean, I have binged both seasons of HBO Max’s cult medical drama, The Pitt, and am now (im)patiently waiting for the season 2 finale to drop. It’s so f*cking good. I was utterly locked in for all 29 episodes. My stand-outs include student doctors Mel (Taylor Dearden, incorporating her own acute ADHD in a really nuanced, sincere way) and Whittaker (the ultimate good egg, played by Welsh actor, Gerran Howell). Would also like sharp but tender nurse, Pearl (played by Amielynn Abellera) to tend to my every scratch and Katherine LaNasa’s Dana to come run my life.
The Pitt paints a compelling and bleak portrait of modern America: exorbitant medical care, opioid addiction, spiked study drugs, mass shooting, racial bias in healthcare, infant drowning (swimming pool deaths are the number 1 cause of death in America for under 4s) and pulsating, omnipresent anger. When Dana is punched in the face, she isn’t surprised. Almost every single person who works in the ER has been physically assaulted by a patient.
It is impossible to watch it and not feel incensed about America’s dire healthcare system: run as a business instead of a public service, with the laughable and constant pressure on understaffed ERs to score ‘better satisfaction results on the patient feedback forms’. One man chooses certain death, over saddling his family with a $100,000 bill. The NHS isn’t perfect, that hardly needs stating, but it is impossible as a British viewer to watch this and not think, we are so bloody lucky to have free healthcare.
It sounds heavy, and it frequently is, but it’s also pacy and highly entertaining (a massive erection - shown in all its empurpled tumescence - is drained of blood after one too many ED injections.) In a pinch, I’d say I preferred the debut season. Season 2’s intake of student doctors aren’t as endearing, or well explored. That said, I found Wyle’s visceral portrayal of Robby’s burnout and PTSD in second 2 - after working on the frontline during Covid - really affecting. And I completely fell apart watching the Honor Walk, a tradition where staff line the corridor to honour the life of an organ donor.
Some light Googling reveals that The Pitt was conceived as a spin-off of ER, but after “negotiations fell apart”, a bunch of ER og’s including Wyle and R. Scott Gemmill went ahead and created The Pitt. The widow of Michael Crichton, who wrote the original ER books, is now suing.
The question now, is: do I start ER? 15 seasons, 331 episodes, 22 Emmys. For this newsletter’s sake, you better hope I don’t.
Two podcast episodes I was utterly engrossed in:
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