What's got my attention this week #101
A bumper round up of links and recs for your watching, reading and listening pleasure
SCROLLING
• Is wisdom signalling the new virtue signalling?
• Delighted to see anorexia in middle-age and beyond, getting some attention. It’s time we started talking about the fact women experience a resurgence of eating disorders in midlife. (Gift link)
• Former NZ PM Jacinda Ardern on empathy, leadership and the politics of blame.
• Self-confessed people pleaser
• No 69-year-old looks like Kris Jenner IRL. Not even Kris Jenner.
• The magic of ‘just ask’.
• Is being single a happier experience for women or men?
• “When I was diagnosed with cancer, my best friend stopped speaking to me.”
• Shirley Manson: rock’s big sister. (Gift link)
• How do I stop comparing myself to others?
• on shaving off her hair.
• “After my divorce I moved back in with my parents. I was 48.”
• Is it possible to rewrite our relationship with time?
• Where have all my deep male friendships gone? (Gift link)
•
on her life as a female body.• New Yorker writers on the novels that changed their lives.
• on mother love and when your teenage daughter gets a tattoo.
• Women who bird.
• Do I trust my husband to know when to end my life? (And vice versa.)
• Is over-compensating the key to getting dressed?
• My mum, Julia Child and me.
• You wait your whole life for a mention of Hildegard of Bingen and then two come along at once! (The first was in this week’s podcast conversation with Melissa Febos.)
• Good skin or good sex? You choose.
• is having an old man summer.
(A note about the links: some are free, some are gift links and some are behind a paywall. Almost all that are (eg New Yorker, The Cut, and many, but not all, Substacks…) allow a few free articles if you register. Those that definitely don't are marked £. I do my best to ensure a balance of non-paywalled articles, but this isn’t always within my control.)
READING
When We Were Killers, CF Barrington
After finishing recording the current season of The Shift podcast I was in need of a dark academia / horny faeries palate cleanser. So, I took myself off to Waterstones, where this month’s Scottish Book of the Month is When We Were Killers. Billed as Saltburn meets The Secret History, how could I refuse? Finn is the troubled working class kid studying divinity in the hallowed halls of the ancient university of St Andrews. There he meets Madri, Magnus, Laurie and falls heavily for Hope, whose backgrounds could not be more privileged, and is soon foresaking his studies to dabble with hallucinogenics and celebrate Celtic festivals in the middle of remote lochs. Death, betrayal and obsession inevitably follow. In all honesty, it’s not in the same ballpark as The Secret History, but it’s highly entertaining, well-written fun all the same.
• When We Were Killers by CF Barrington is out in paperback now. You can buy it from amazon, Waterstones or The Shift bookshop on bookshop.org.
WATCHING
Dept Q, Netflix
So much to love about this knotty thriller based on the books by Jussi Adler-Olsen. In no particular order:
• It’s very successfully relocated from Copenhagan to a beautifully gritty Edinburgh. (Although, can I just say, the 25 bus does not go along that street!)
• Matthew Goode (Brideshead, The Crown, Downton, Matthew the vampire in A Discovery of Witches), gleefully playing against repressed posh-boy type as Carl Morck (above centre), the rude maverick (of course) detective, battling PTSD and consigned to an office in the basement. Goode milks all the irascible middle-aged detective tropes and somehow makes them feel new(ish) again.
• Kelly Macdonald and Shirley Henderson doing what only they can. And TBH, the entire cast is brilliant, but with an extra shout out to Jamie Sives as Morck’s former partner, DCI James Hardy. (You’ll see why).
• The satisfyingly macabre (OK, harrowing) plot, confidently drawn out over nine episodes. The only teeny drawback is that I’ve read the book, so I already knew why Merritt was in the tube. (Not a spoiler.) But that’s just me. It’s a class act. And hopefully the first season of many.
(And by the way, Slow Horses is back on Apple TV+, 25 September – just a couple of weeks after Mick Herron’s new Slough House thriller, Clown Town, is published. Get both in your diary now.)
ON THE SHIFT PODCAST THIS WEEK…
…author and essayist
joined me to talk about her decision to give up sex and intimacy for a year – and what it taught her, not just about her relationships with friends, family and lovers, but about independence, creativity, sexuality and above all herself.• What are you reading, watching, listening to this month?
* A note: this post contains affiliate links, which means that a very small percentage of any sale goes to help fund The Shift. If it’s orange (or underlined if you’re reading in the app), it links! (But not all orange/underlined links are affiliates…)
Thank you for sharing my Wisdom Signalling thing! U so kind. Glad you liked it. Great picks, love your list.
So happy to see Bernadine win! Really wonderful news 😍 I love her work. I will definitely check out Dept Q.