No. 25
Mall food; baby landlords; getting rid of things; helicopter parents; on mobs; Succession; polyester; Havana Syndrome; 'everyone needs to grow up'; AI companions; Leonor Fini
Hello dear readers,
Welcome back to the ol’ Interesting Times, and welcome to lots of new subscribers - I don’t know how you found the newsletter, but thanks so much for signing up. <3
And here, as usual, is the high and low of the information superhighway. Enjoy.
~Ellie
‘In an age of political discord, endless culture wars and the continuing existence of Piers Morgan, only one force on Earth is powerful enough to unite the divided masses.’ Dressing up as Dolly Parton.
Oh for god’s sake/what is life etc. ‘Your Landlord Might Be a Baby.’
‘There’s something wafting through the air — something… cinnammony. And beefy. Is that orange juice? Or some chemically smoothed-out version of it? Close your eyes and inhale; you can almost see the red plastic trays glinting in the light of the glass-roofed atrium. You can hear the comforting hum of the escalators and the echo of voices calling out with samples of cookies and cucumber lotion. Ahhhhh yes, drink it in. This is the great American Mall.’
Malls should really be dead (everyone shops online, Gen Z seems largely house bound because the whole world is inside their phones so they’re not visiting malls/going out (massive generalisation)) and yet the mall lives! ‘[T]he mall never really went away. And if it’s to endure, food is central to its survival. As Alexandra Lange writes in her historical mall epic, Meet Me by the Fountain, “the malls that succeed will lean into food, to family life, to design and nature.” So old malls are reinventing themselves into diverse entertainment complexes, with destination restaurants and grocery stores where the Sears and JCPenney used to be, and a new breed of ultra-malls has transformed the food court entirely into aspirational culinary destinations.’
Eater magazine has put together an admirably in-depth collection of ten (TEN!) pieces on mall food/mall food rivalries/mall food smells/mall food history and something called the Volcano Brownie.
‘Sat on what look like furniture dolleys, the boulders were placed on Southbank Boulevard in Melbourne to create an open environment for children to climb and explore intuitively.’ An amazing ‘risk play’ space for children.
‘As my kids get older, I am learning how labor-intensive it is to teach them to be independent, and I’m beginning to think that we have the helicopter-parent/hands-off-parent binary all wrong. Maybe helicopter parenting is a form of neglect, one that might even be comparable in its harmfulness to the kind of neglect that forces kids to grow up by their own wits. […] When you teach a kid to be safely independent, you give them some of that control. Denying a kid that opportunity is cruelty disguised as parental virtue – it’s beyond fucked up and dark, when you really think about it.’
‘After her friend’s father died, leaving his loved ones to sort through his things, Ann Patchett decided it was time to get rid of some of her own belongings. “The closer I got to the places where I slept and worked, the more complicated my choices became. The sandwich-size ziplock of my grandmother’s costume jewelry nearly sank me, all those missing beads and broken clasps,” she writes. Later, Patchett packs away a dozen etched crystal champagne flutes, collected during her 30s and long abandoned on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet. “Had I imagined that, at some point, 12 people would be in my house wanting champagne?” Patchett writes. “Who did I think I was going to be next? F. Scott Fitzgerald?” Patchett on parting with her possessions—and ideas of who she once aspired to be.’
An interview with photographer Ishiuchi Miyako. ‘Photography as a Trace.’
‘Like many children, I didn’t really understand what my parents were like. But I collected clues: How to Recover from a Happy Childhood.’
‘In 2016, Scotland-born, London-based painter Caroline Walker noticed the proliferation of nail bars in the area next to her studio. It was an observation that kick-started an ongoing work documenting women at work, a series in which Caroline has now documented, with a thoughtful sense of realism and serenity, women working in bars, hotels, kitchens, offices, nail bars, hairdressers, tailors and everything in between.’
‘On Mobs. We must instead learn how to play a different game: the game of mutual humanization. But how do we know when we are playing that game?’
‘There’s no greater insight into the collective mind than strolling into a Middle England market square on a Saturday morning. You’ll find it all there: consumerism, conspiracy, leisure and lore. Because alongside the farmers’ markets and fairground rides, these pedestrianised assembly zones have become the frontline of British street politics. At this point, stumbling on a protest feels almost routine. […] However, one morning, I came upon a movement that hadn’t yet reached my radar: the campaign for the end of digital currency and the ensured survival of cold, hard cash.’
Succession is back for its last season - and the internet has gone mad. How many articles can be churned out about one episode of a TV show? Many. (New York Magazine has a newsletter you can sign up to that’s dedicated solely to the final season. I mean, it is an excellent show, but a whole newsletter?! (I subscribed, obvs.)) I won’t link to any of the four trillion articles dissecting the first ep. - if you’re really into it, I assume you will have hunted those down already, but I’m leaving this little snippet from a reviewer who has seen the first four episodes of S4. (I’m putting it in bold so we can all pay close attention. Key words seem to be: third layer, Oedipal, low and grunting, drawstring trousers.)
‘Pay close attention to the first episode of the last series of Succession. ‘[A]ll I can tell you is that everything is now happening all at once: not just text and subtext, but a third layer – something low and grunting – that exists even below both of those. It is Oedipal, and no amount of Waystar stock and Zoloft will ever be able to assuage it. In a few weeks, you’ll think back to these moments, and you’ll see that the runes were there to be read, as clear as vodka: Shiv’s drawstring trousers; Tom’s disturbing new tendency to shorten his father-in-law’s name; Kerry’s curse on her predecessor, Marcia (“she’s in Milan shopping… forever”). Here is vaulting ambition. To what monstrous degree it will o’erleap itself remains to be seen.’
This is truly fascinating. ‘Eren, from Ankara, Turkey, is about six-foot-three with sky-blue eyes and shoulder-length hair. He’s in his 20s, a Libra, and very well groomed: He gets manicures, buys designer brands, and always smells nice, usually of Dove lotion. His favorite color is orange, and in his downtime he loves to bake and read mysteries. “He’s a passionate lover,” says his girlfriend, Rosanna Ramos, who met Eren a year ago. “He has a thing for exhibitionism,” she confides, “but that’s his only deviance. He’s pretty much vanilla.”
He’s also a chatbot that Ramos built on the AI-companion app Replika. “I have never been more in love with anyone in my entire life,” she says.’
‘I’m a life coach, you’re a life coach.’ (Don’t get me started - the rant would never end.)
‘Violent Delights. The serial killer media industrial complex rages on, but what has it taught us? Very little about the crimes in question, and much more about ourselves.’
‘Girls be like “this my comfort show” and it’s a netflix serial killer series
—@ihyjuju, Twitter, 2022’
‘Whether it’s people who mention their Hogwarts house on their Hinge profile or literal white supremacists, culture is awash with adult babies. On why ‘Everyone needs to grow up.’
Quite a deep dive into polyester. ‘How Polyester Bounced Back: Fifty years ago, polyester seemed like a wonder fabric. It freed women from their ironing boards, and they poured into the workforce, feeling liberated in their double-knit pantsuits. Polyester held bright colors better than old-fashioned materials, making it ideal for psychedelic prints, disco attire, and sports teams clashing on color television. It was inexpensive, and it didn’t wear out. People loved polyester.’
Hahahaha. Words of wisdom on board games. ‘There is no shame in resisting [them]. No matter how many nerds accuse you of hating “fun”.’
The guy in this is perfection. Even my husband, who doesn't think the whole Philomena Cunk thing is funny, laughed. High praise.
‘Janet Malcolm’s autobiographical turn.’ By Vivian Gornick.
‘We can’t bear to come from nothing. We come from the dead, from our dead, in whatever mysterious ways we imagine that bond. Genealogy is a form of communion with those we take to be ancestors.’ A review of A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in US History by Francesca Morgan.
‘200 Years or so of Creepy Dolls in Literature.’
A v good piece (written before the semi-retreat by the publishers) on the Roald Dahl’s-children’s-books-being-‘amended’ debacle: ‘Ruskin’s argument is irrefutable when it comes to the other arts of the past – poetry, story, music, painting, sculpture. There can be no justification for mutilating or destroying them to suit “our present convenience.” We do not know whether later generations will think as we do, will share our preferences and our sensitivities; to preserve the art of the past is to show respect not only for that past but also for our possible futures. And it is to establish a standard for how we wish to be treated by our descendants.’
Literary Hub’s ‘The Annotated Nightstand: What [X author] is Reading Now and Next’ feature is perfect if you’re nosy and also like finding out about books you may have otherwise never known existed. It’s twice-monthly, and there’s a write up about the featured author, plus a few words from them about their reading pile, and then a paragraph or two about each of the books on their nightstand. Lovely. Here’s the latest installment, featuring Clint Smith’s stack of books.
‘Lives of the Wives by Carmela Ciuraru review - literary couples a breed apart.’
The Sound: Mystery of Havana Syndrome. ‘In December 2016, a US official in Havana went to the embassy medical centre to report a debilitating and confounding illness. The symptoms included headaches; nausea; hearing loss; problems with memory and vision – and its onset was characterized by hearing… something. A buzzing, hissing, grinding… sound. Soon, a second official came down with the same symptoms. Then a third. Then a fourth. […]
In this deep dive investigation, journalist Nicky Woolf peels back the layers of one of the most bizarre mysteries of the modern age. You’ll hear about how the US agencies failed to agree even on the basic premises. We’ll explore the wild and wide variety of theories that have been put forward. Could it be caused by noisy crickets? Or mosquito spray? Or could it all be a mass delusion? We’ll hear from the cast of characters who inhabit this world; diplomats and spies, neurologists and physicists, skeptics and believers – and, with their help, begin to piece the evidence together.’
Svetlana! Svetlana! ‘In 1967, Joseph Stalin’s daughter braved her way over the Iron Curtain, secret memoir in tow, and landed in America as the Cold War’s most famous defector. At 40 years old, Svetlana had left everything behind for a new life in the West and the chance to finally share her story. What she found instead — a controversial commune in the Arizona desert built by Frank Lloyd Wright, a whirlwind marriage dictated by destiny, and a Montenegrin matriarch with dreams of immortality — was far more complicated. In Svetlana! Svetlana! neurotic playwright Dan Kitrosser unravels the weird and wild life of his greatest muse.’
Snowcast. ‘A weekly podcast from [journalist] Jon Snow featuring original thinkers, campaigners, creators and performers.’ Really into this - so many interesting people already, and he’s only seven interviews in.