What's got my attention this week #40
Links, recs and whole bunch of things to get you through the weekend
SCROLLING
• “Going for Botox with my 82-year-old mother.”
• “I’m amputating you!” Frida Kahlo writes to Diego Rivera.
• The guilt is coming from inside the house! How much do I love
• Screens are ruining us. So what can we do about it, asks
• The truth about the marriagability gap.
• Women write sentimental stories about love, men write important books.... and other such nonsense.
• Why giving up makeup was a “healing experience” for Pamela Anderson.
• on the dangers of defaulting finance stuff to men.
• The battle to overthrow the Tampax empire.
• Why are we so surprised when “old” people do “young” things?
• Kate Muir on the menopause war we’re still fighting and this week’s backlash from the medical establishment. £
• Gen-Xers! Step away from the voice notes!
• Love this thread on taking breaks from our lives.
• The employers that want you to create a “users manual of me”. £
• Searching for Savita. is in search of the untold stories of women killed by abortion bans.
• J-Lo and the fetishisation of a “good work ethic”.
• Why men interrupt. £
• Drew Barrymore has jumped on the menopause bandwagon. has thoughts.
• on why magic matters.
• “Nicole Kidman is driving me crazy.” Not me, but Elizabeth Grey. This piece made me howl.
(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 £.)
READING
I’ve loved Kristi Coulter’s writing ever since I discovered her sobriety memoir, Nothing Good Can Come From This, so I was excited to get my hands on Exit Interview, the life and death of my ambitious career, her no-holds barred account of the decade or so she spent trying and failing to get promoted while female at Amazon’s head office in Seattle. And… it didn’t disappoint! Basically, if you ever thought your boss was an a-hole, your office culture was sexist, racist, ableist and any other ist you can think of, you have NO IDEA. You will laugh, cry, howl, rage and, I’m sure, massively over-identify with Coulter as the good girl in her is slowly but surely driven out of her. Exit Interview doesn’t have a UK publisher but you can still get it easily from all the usual online places, including you know where! (Oh, the irony.)
WATCHING
Anatomy of a Fall, in cinemas and available to rent on Amazon Prime
I’m a sucker for anything vaguely crimey with subtitles so I’ve been trying to find a cinema near me to see this ever since I first started hearing the buzz. In the end, I gave up and downloaded it from the bad place. On the face of it, this German-French-English film is a perfectly pitched court room drama, but it’s also an intricate exploration of the slow crumbling of a relationship in the lead up to the ‘did he fall, did he jump or was he pushed?’ inciting moment before Samuel is found in the snow outside the family’s chalet. Directed and co-written by Justine Triet, it won the Palme D’Or, is now nominated for several Oscars, including best director and picture (let’s see what happens on Sunday night…) and boasts a devastating performance from German actor Sandra Hüller as Sandra who is suspected of killing her husband, Samuel. She is also, deservedly nominated for a best actress Oscar (but so are Emma Stone and Lily Gladstone, so…). Anyway, hers is not the only standout performance by a longshot. Milo Machado-Graner is astonishing as their partially sighted 11-year-old son Daniel. And who can avoid giving a shout out to Messi, the border collie who steals every scene he’s in as Snoop, Daniel’s canine carer?
LISTENING…
• Carrie Jade Does Not Exist has been accompanying me on my daily walks this week and what great company it’s been. Hosted by the surprisingly engaging pairing of Sue Perkins and investigative journalist Katherine Denkinson, it’s a six-part podcast that digs into the backstory of TikTok activist Carrie Jade Williams who went viral when she claimed she was being sued by an AirB’n’B guest for – get this – being disabled. It won’t surprise you to hear it was all one big scam. Carrie does not exist, and nor do any of the other women she pretended to be. Completely addictive.
ON THE SHIFT PODCAST THIS WEEK…
… this week’s episode felt like a risky one (the kind the management would have tried to warn me off when I was a magazine editor!). But it turns out you are all here for Karyn McCluskey – and how. The love for this episode already this week has blown me away. And that’s as it should be, because Karyn is quite something. Now Chief Exec of Community Justice Scotland, Karyn is a forensic psychologist who, during her time with the Strathclyde police force, was instrumental in helping to reduce gang violence by 50% in Glasgow. In this episode Karyn talks candidly about endlessly being the only woman in the room, surviving in the force as a single mother (including breastfeeding in the police car park), her own fear of menopause and making sure her staff don’t feel the same and so much more.
• What are you reading, watching and listening to at the moment?
* A note: this post contains affiliate links, which means that a very small percentage of any sale goes to help fund The Shift.
Karyn is one of the best guests ever.
Thanks for including more 'normal' people on the podcast. I'm looking forward to listening and have downloaded it ready.
I also think Snoop should have an Oscar on Sunday night - he was brilliant in Anatomy of a fall!