Some light reading this week since I sent a mid-week missive! I’m still trying to find a catchy name for my weekly culture roundups ala “Haterade” for my sports roundups; any and all suggestions welcome!
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Some real May Day, labor/worker solidarity, “power to the people” themes this week. No, nothing about The Idea of You here but I will say: I loved it for what it was, I thought Anne Hathaway was smoking hot, the two leads had incredible chemistry, and the set design—but especially the interiors of Hathaway’s character’s LA craftsman—was to die for. I didn’t read the book so maybe that’s why I loved it; the main beef most people seem to have with the film is the way it handles its source material (though I will read anything
writes about anything so).Culture-related reading
The Pulitzer Prize released a statement offering support and solidarity with student journalists during the ongoing censorship of student newspapers and reporters during the campus protests of the Palestinian genocide:
As we gather to consider the nation’s finest and most courageous journalism, the Pulitzer Prize Board would like to recognize the tireless efforts of student journalists across our nation’s college campuses, who are covering protests and unrest in the face of great personal and academic risk. We would also like to acknowledge the extraordinary real-time reporting of student journalists at Columbia University, where the Pulitzer Prizes are housed, as the New York Police Department was called onto campus on Tuesday night. In the spirit of press freedom, these students worked to document a major national news event under difficult and dangerous circumstances and at risk of arrest.
GQ chatted with Darnell Appling, the umpire in Challengers (and Zendaya’s longtime IRL bestie). He actually went to umpire school for the role, a tidbit I love!
Over at
, examines the fatphobia of Baby Reindeer: “Why did Martha have to be fat? In some ways this is just lazy story-telling, a nudge-nudge wink-wink to an audience that can be relied upon to channel fatphobic tropes of fat women as unfuckable, or at least, unloveable. But this sly elbowing of the audience into viewing Martha through a fatphobic lens does more than this too: it centers Dunn’s empathy for her, rather than inviting anything approaching empathy on our part for her character.”- has a wonderful essay up at Slate about deciding to write about her cousin’s murder, not as a true crime story, but as a love story (relatedly, Lilly’s next book, First Love: Essays on Friendship, from which this essay is taken, publishes Tuesday and you should definitely grab a copy!)
For May Day,
highlighted the 1982 story about a British trans woman who was fired from her job at the General Electric Company after transitioning. Her fellow trade unionists at ASTMS rallied around her and successfully won her job back.I was bowled over by this essay from
looking at the astrological charts of the U.S. and Israel:“The most commonly used chart for the United States is characterized by its eagle-screech of a Sagittarius rising, which enacts “freedom” and “expansion” as its guiding principle. However, the United States is a fundamentally 8th house nation: it secures its freedom at the expense of what once belonged to someone else. It expands as a matter of Manifest Destiny, leaving trails of tears and bones in its wake. It maintains its own imperative as ideological enforcer to the rest of the world through a tangled web of debt, trade, and dependence that’s roughly 750 military bases wide.
In this respect, the U.S. and Israel are natural bedfellows. Three core significations of the 8th house include death, debt, and other people’s resources. In mundane astrology, this last part relates more to financial entanglements with other nations, but stories of land theft, ethnic cleansing, and genocide fit here too. Both the U.S. and Israel share an origin story such as this.”
Loving the photo you posted at the end
Related only to the gif you used at the top of the newsletter, I wanted to let you know that I recently watched Bend It Like Beckham for the first time!! You're 100% influencing the amount of queer sports media I'm consuming lately!