First up, because so many of you are new to The Shift, I thought I’d take the pay wall off a popular post I wrote six months ago. Let me know if it resonates.
SCROLLING
• It feels like the entire internet has been talking about this piece about mega-podcaster Andrew Huberman and his flexible approach to monogamy. I guess, for me, the main question, is why aren’t we surprised?
• Divorce is having a moment.
• Stephen King’s Carrie is 50 (yikes!), Margaret Atwood has thoughts.
• How Gen X women waved goodbye to the dream job.
• “But he didn’t hit you, did he?” Excellent report by Amelia Gentleman from inside the coercive control courtroom.
• Lovely piece by
• Gloria Steinem turned 90.
• Is your obsession with being healthy actually making you unwell?
• in praise of pleasure over approval.
• Is there an emotional horror show playing out in your brain? has some ideas for taming it.
• Loved this interview with Tracey Emin by (video).
• “I lost my life in 2006”. Stunning piece on life after brain injury.
• “Now that we do everything else from home, why don’t we try living in it?”
• Is there a cure for the curse of digital over-abundance? £
• Hate to break it to you, but playground bullies do prosper.
• Do you find “summer people” scary-confident? I do!
• My pants are too small; keep or ditch?
• Learning to tolerate unknowns will make you stronger.
• Gorgeous piece by on being a shopkeeper’s granddaughter.
• Check into the bygone era of single ladies hotels. (If you like this you might enjoy The Barbizon, the New York hotel that set women free by Paulina Bren.)
• What if I don’t want to take care of my ageing, homophobic parents?
• Sure-fire signs you should give up on a book. (I’m 57, why do I have so much difficulty doing this?)
• 13 ways of looking at socks.
(A note about the links: some are behind a paywall, but almost all (eg The New York Times, New Yorker, The Cut, and many, but not all, Substacks…) can be accessed free by registering. Those that definitely can't are marked £.)
GIVING ME JOY THIS WEEK…
Bjork, nailing her first ever Vogue cover (shame!) at 58.
READING
A bumper haul of books I’ve read this month
In no particular order… one of my fave books of last year Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy, which asks why average-looking men continually bag hot women, but the same is rarely true the other way round, is out now in paperback and en route to becoming an actual romcom courtesy of Reese Witherspoon. • As you’ll know if you’ve heard this week’s episode of The Shift podcast, beloved Australian writer Helen Garner is getting some long overdue recognition in the Northern Hemisphere, with the reissue of three of her greatest hits: debut novel Monkey Grip; small but perfectly formed The Children’s Bach; and true crime classic This House of Grief. (Gorgeous jackets, too.) • Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City books provided a lifeline as I floundered around London in my early twenties. Since then, I’ve never missed one. The latest, Mona of the Manor is set in the 1990s, the AIDS epidemic is in full-throttle and Mona is now lady of the manor in the cotswolds and… a mother. (In a way that only Mona knows how!) It’s not his best, but a few hours spent with Mona, Mouse and the #oldbirdrolemodel Mrs Madrigal is something you’ll never regret. • For the podcast I’ve been reading a host of memoirs in which Gen X and “geriatric millennial” women shed a light on some less than palatable truths about being a woman. Two recent favourites are Splinters, Leslie Jamison’s memoir of divorce, motherhood and the eternal struggle to be a mother/daughter/wife/lover/person all at the same time, and Molly Roden Winter’s More, the story of how one woman discovered herself and her sexuality through opening up her marriage - and learnt to stop people-pleasing in the process. • The last two are both currently on the go: first up, Andrew O’Hagan’s absolutely blimmin massive, Caledonian Road. Coming in at a stonking 640 pages, it skilfully dissects white male privilege through a year in the life of art historian (and all round pain in the ass) Campbell Flynn as his painstakingly built house of cards comes tumbling down. And lastly, for the writers amongst you, I’ve been having a bit of a block with the fiction I’m meant to be writing (sorry, Rachel!) so I’ve turned to 1000 Words: a writer’s guide to staying creative, focussed and productive all year round by
WATCHING
3 Body Problem, Netflix
I’m three episodes in to this epic science fiction series and already my mind is fully blown. If I lost you at SF, come back! Because the clue is in the “epic”, rather than the “SF” (even though it’s adapted from Chinese writer Liu Cixin’s award-winning SF trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past). Let me scroll back. We start in 1967 in the midst of the Chinese Cultural revolution, then we hop forward to 2024 where the world’s brightest scientists begin dying mysteriously, and then we find ourselves in a terrifyingly real virtual reality (with two of those scientists Jin (Jess Hong) and Jack (John Bradley) above. Well, Jin is a scientist, Jack has opted out and made a fortune from ‘snacks’). Then there’s their friend Auggie Salazar (Eliza Gonzalez), a scientist whose life is literally ticking away before her eyes and physicist Ye Winjie (Rosalind Chao) whose daughter, Vera, (also a physicist…) recently died by suicide. If this all sounds boggling, it is - and it isn’t - because you’re in safe hands. Showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss wrestled Game of Thrones into submission, and the script is by Alexander Woo, who wrote True Blood. If anyone knows how to handle a monster, they do.
• If your brain is aching, there’s also Sally Wainwright’s Renegade Nell (Disney+), starring Derry Girl Louisa Hartland as Nell, who is framed for murder and soon becomes the 18th century’s most wanted outlaw (think Wainwright’s Gentleman Jack meets Enola Holmes); Passenger (ITVx and Sunday/Monday 9pm) a kind of folk horror Broadchurch and, as an aside, I noticed the wonderful documentary Three Salons by the Seaside is still on BBCiplayer. If you haven’t seen it, it’s heaven.
LISTENING….
• to Electoral Dysfunction, the new(ish) weekly politics show featuring Labour MP Jess Phillips, former leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Ruth Davidson, and Sky political editor Beth Rigby. It’s worth checking in with occasionally, if only for a slightly different take on the exhausting political issues of the day. If you love Jess and/or Ruth, you’ll likely love it. If not, probably not!
• Grace Dent reissued the episode of Comfort Eating with Hairy Biker Dave Myers who died last month. You’ll need tissues.
• Feeling woefully ill-informed on the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, AI, I’ve been listening to Black Box, an exploration into where AI came from, in the hope of pinning the tail on the donkey of where it might be going. None the wiser, but fascinating all the same.
AND ON THE SHIFT PODCAST THIS WEEK…
…Australian literary legend Helen Garner, tells it like it is and then some! She kept me up way past my bedtime talking about difficult father-daughter relationships, making peace with the older generations, why getting married a fourth time would have been the definition of madness, how she couldn’t give a shit about the withdrawal of the erotic gaze and why she finds it a bit cringe that her debut novel, Monkey Grip, is finding a whole new audience 50 years after it was first published. (Clue: sex and drugs!)
I love hearing other people’s recommendations. Let me know what you’re reading, watching, listening to etc that might be up my alley
* A note: this post contains affiliate links, which means that a very small percentage of any sale goes to help fund The Shift.
Great recs! My husband looked over my shoulder when I opened your newsletter and said, “that’s a very handsome picture” (of Olivia Colman). Interesting choice of word as he hadn’t even read the caption below!
Sam. I'm obsessed with your newsletter! I'm so glad I found it. Your description of Passenger "folk horror Broadchurch" sold the show for me. I'll start watching ASAP