I’ve devoted hours to learning how to edit in CapCut, invested money in buying new camera equipment, and spent time researching, approaching and organising guests that I truly think possess interesting enough taste for us to pay attention to. Yet this week my brain has decided that nothing looks good enough, I need to hire a team of three, and I should be further along than I am. I’m two guests in. If this were the birth of a child, the child would be half in, half out.

What happened? I posted my interview with the imitable Honey Ross (who truly has the best taste in film), and I received a message from an old colleague who asked about how I became so comfortable in front of a camera. What I saw with my video, somebody else viewed entirely differently, and it was a real watershed moment for me. Another reminder that nobody is paying as close attention to what you’re doing as you do, so do what needs to be done without looking over your shoulder. The day you plant the seed isn’t the day you eat the fruit, and done is better than perfect!

It’s hard to remind yourself of that, particularly when you’re spinning so many plates. So if you’re there, in that dark place, questioning why your content doesn’t look like so-and-so’s, or why you spend hours trying to figure out how to add captions on CapCut (yes, really), don’t be so hard on yourself — you never know who’s watching. <3

Under the paywall today is an Emma Grede deep dive and a general meditation on the state of influencing today, what it means to perform online, and how it can be done successfully (if at all). It’s slightly longer than usual because of the deep dive, but enjoy!

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The success story of Amelia Dimoldenburg’s Chicken Shop Date is one such example of how new media, hosted on social media platforms, is drawing eyeballs and attention away from legacy media and towards younger stars and buzzier formats, as is laid out in this Guardian report from the Edinburgh TV Festival.

Make no mistake: there is still a vital and urgent requirement for impartial, fair and investigative journalism, but the fun, buzzier strains of entertainment reporting are being reimagined by younger people for younger audience and I find it genuinely enthralling to watch, and to be an absolutely minuscule part of it. Media hierarchy, in the eyes of publicists certainly, is changing!

On a macro scale, look at the fact that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce still haven’t released any pictures or detailed interviews of their wedding; the power of their own individual platforms, and the knowledge that they, themselves, have the power to detail their wedding as they wish means they don’t need a starry endorsement or branded collaboration. The power of their presence stands strong enough on its own to defy the requests of media outlets to tell their story on their behalf. They can tell their own story, their way.

On a considerably smaller scale, it’s the same for people creating on the internet. In your hand lies a miniature computer, which quite literally puts the world at your fingertips. And therein lies our power to tell our own stories or exert our own influence in whichever way we choose. We might not have the colossal brand presence of the Kelce-Swifts, but the point remains: media is changing, how people consume is changing, and we are all able to now control how our work is made and communicated.

Under the paywall today is the podcast I’ve been listening to about the Tupac murder trial, an eery mother-daughter novel I’ve re-discovered and lots of other goodies. Enjoy!

• The John Galliano Met exhibition is off! I didn’t know that, before committing to the exhibition, Galliano met with Jewish leaders as organised by Anna Wintour and Andrew Bolton, per the New York Times.

Most of the Jewish leaders came away satisfied that Galliano was sufficiently repentant for the hateful remarks he had made. When news of the exhibition became public, Wintour told The Times, “There is no one more deserving of an exhibition of this scale than John Galliano.” She added: “His career isn’t defined by a single moment.”

But others questioned why the museum had decided to honour him at a time of rising antisemitism. Angela W. Buchdahl, the senior rabbi of Central Synagogue, a reform synagogue in Manhattan, was even invited to be on the host committee of the gala by Wintour, but declined.

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That’s the main focus of today’s newsletter; paying homage to Dolly in all of her glory, but among the Dolly-loving, I’ve also been reading books (some good, some less so), and it made me consider my place as a now-freelance culture editor. When a writer is in-house at a publication, radical honesty is often prohibited. As publicists, brands and relationships are prioritised, opinions are compromised. Now that I’m freelance and have a space that’s my own to say what I want to say, I still feel that it’s important to only really say something when it’s nice. As the old adage goes, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

My reasoning is different now, though. I actually don’t feel that it’s my job to critique another person’s work (I actually feel quite strongly that it’s not), and while the algorithms reward negativity and the hive-mind nature of the internet means that I could create a snowball effect of sharing my honest thoughts on this book or that series or this film, I simply won’t do it because I don’t think it’s right. It’s not entirely removed from the commitment Parton had to never publicly discuss politics; it didn’t mean she didn’t have her own opinions, but rather she understood the role that she played in people’s lives, and it wasn’t for her to stoke division.

Behind the paywall here, I feel a little more comfortable sharing my balanced thoughts and feelings, but there are still limits to what I will share publicly about other people’s work. Writers go through years, months, weeks, days and rounds and rounds of edits before a book becomes the selection of pages that we will pick up and read, and the same of directors, screenwriters and so many others. Taste is subjective; just because I didn’t like something, doesn’t mean you won’t.

I suppose I say all of that to say that we should be careful about the opinions that we share online. Recommendation-sharing is fun and spreads the love, and opinion-sharing can and should be too, but never unkind.

Under the paywall today are my thoughts on two of summer’s hottest reads, a string of Dolly recommendations (RIP forever and ever), and a film that was recommended to me by one of my future guests of WHAT’S GOOD, and I adored it. A truly, truly must-watch seminal film. Enjoy!

• Is hating influencers just another way of hating women? This is a fantastic piece from Laura Jung for Vogue, and it touches on something that seems to be a common occurrence: placing blame about the demise of society at influencers’ feet, as though they are somehow morally at fault. The double standards, unsurprisingly, at the heart of the argument are inherently misogynistic.

What is decidedly anti-feminist is not necessarily to participate in these systems — the reality is that we all do to varying degrees—but opting not to acknowledge the inequalities that sustain them until you personally become the target of criticism. There is something deeply hypocritical about discovering and using the language of women’s liberation only when your own status, reputation, or income is at stake. If misogyny matters when it is directed at a wealthy woman with hundreds of thousands of followers, then surely the exploitation of the women sewing her clothes, caring for her children, cleaning her home, packing her products, or otherwise subsidizing the frictionless lifestyle she sells should matter too.

Feminism cannot simply mean defending women when we identify with them, aspire to be them, or see ourselves reflected in their grievances. A politics of women’s liberation has to extend downward as readily as it extends sideways and upward. Otherwise, what we are defending is not feminism — which is collective advocacy — but individual advancement.

• One of my good friends is heartbroken at the moment. Her boyfriend broke up with her a few days ago and when I called to check in on her yesterday, she told me that the whole relationship and its consequent failure felt connected to the city she lives in. She’s had itchy feet for a while, she told me, and nothing good has ever come from the place she calls home. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that connection between the things we experience, and the places we’re in when we experience said things, and the trauma we then associate with that place.

  It’s something that Jorja Smith touched on in this Guardian profile; at the height of her fame, she moved from London back to her home of Walsall: “I just needed a reset,” she says. “I thought: Let me move back home, touch some grass, see some trees.” London, she says, had become tangled up with the pressures of her career. This City, one of the tracks on What Are the Odds, explores her love-hate relationship with the capital. “Anything negative that happened, I kind of put London as the culprit,” she says. “I was like: ‘I hate this place. I need to get out.’”

  It seems to me as though it may be something of a universal feeling, but I’m curious whether any of you have ever experienced it?

• The way that Dolly Parton sidestepped controversy and really remained a beacon

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I believe strongly in the power of dismantling your life when you have a niggling, unshakeable feeling that something just isn’t quite right. Nothing proves your own resilience, strength and power more than taking apart the pieces that make your life yours, and allowing them to fall into place where they’re meant to be. Leaving my job in December 2025 was one such act of dismantling my life. There was no plan, just a niggling sense that I needed to pursue something else, something different.

The last nine months have been a wild, unpredictable ride that has taught and exposed me to so much. One such thing is how recommendation culture, itself a symptom of self-optimisation culture, has swept all of us into its midst. The culture recommendations that my algorithm has served me have been fine, but so many of them seem to me to have been proffered for the sake of boosting somebody’s numbers, eyeballs, digits. All of the metrics that I spent years defining success by in my previous job, and ultimately metrics that cannot be used to define a compelling piece of culture. Culture is more than numbers, eyeballs and digits, it is purely and exclusively about what something makes you feel. That feeling, that heart, is simply not something that computers or technology are able to comprehend, which is why taste has become the currency du jour in Silicon Valley. It is simply not something that can be cheated or coded.

The reality is that the best recommendations rarely come from an algorithm or a trending list or a keyword. Instead, they come from people whose taste has been developed over years, experiences and exposure to different things, thoughts and people. It’s with this in mind that I started WHAT’S GOOD, my new culture recommendation series that I’m going to be sharing on Instagram and TikTok, in which I ask people whose taste I truly trust what they actually love — and find the things we might not discover otherwise. My first guest is Madeline Cash, the author of the feted Lost Lambs, and I have many, many more up my sleeve.

I’d be so grateful if you watched and engaged with the series and if you like it, please tell me! Likewise, if there’s somebody whose taste YOU truly trust who you think I should speak to, please tell me! I’m so excited to make culture recommendations on the internet better, and I hope you’ll join me in my mission. <3

• I haven’t been following the Lindsay Clancy trial with the fervour that my American friends and family have, but this New York Times piece does a pretty good job of breaking down the facts. In addition, this New Yorker piece, on the conspiracy theories that have erupted around the case and what they’re truly symptomatic of — the frustration around who gets to be believed, who doesn’t, and why — is brilliant. It is a harrowing, tragic, heart-wrenching case, and I can’t help but wonder why such sad cases need to be televised and watched as a sordid form of entertainment for the whole world.

  Those who are unconvinced of Clancy’s postpartum-psychosis defense may have seen her breakdown as crocodile tears, or, more charitably, as an authentic display of anguish and remorse for a crime she must pay for. What others saw was state-sanctioned torture porn — the sadistic spectacle, broadcast for the delectation of a conspiracy-addled public, of a mentally ill mother who tried to die and is now living out a fate worse than death. For months, she had said, in so many words, that she couldn’t do this. Everyone can hear her now.

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We had the best time — a private boat tour, jewellery-making workshops and more karaoke than my throat could handle, hence my now raspy, husky and near-broken voice — but one of the absolute highlights was the mini inflatable version of my fiancé that I panic ordered a few days before. We took him everywhere — to the clubs, the bars, the shows. He was the life of the party and, to anybody organising any kind of party, hen or otherwise, I cannot recommend buying one enough. He was the best £27 I’ve ever spent, and the link to make your own is here.

I also wore a low-rise silk skort from Fruity Booty for dinner on our first evening, and, I must say, since buying it earlier this summer amid one of London’s first stiflingly hot heatwaves I have worn repeatedly. It’s utterly fabulous.

Warning: I have a fairly serious surgery on Wednesday to remove a growth in my uterus (TMI, but also just keeping it real), so this week’s dispatches may be somewhat disparate but I’ll do my best to keep them consistent. Bear with me. <3

• Johnny Depp is reportedly set to reprise his role as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Er, just no.

• Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have noticed the current social media trend of everything being ‘kinda chic.’ I’ve found it nauseating. I find the rapid pace of most trends on social media nauseating, to be honest, and this analysis from The Guardian made me laugh and boggled my mind: per the piece, according to Google Trends, searches for the term ‘chic’ are up 5000% while on last check the hashtag has amassed over 60k posts on Instagram. The quiche one made me laugh:

  The images are usually a mirror selfie or a fancy cup of matcha – but the trends vary. This morning alone I have seen posts spanning everything from “kinda chic to repeat outfits” to “kinda chic to always have a trip booked” to “kinda chic to be overdressed” to “kinda chic to bake a quiche,” (to be fair it did look like a very nice quiche).

• My wonderful former editor Katie O’Malley wrote a piece for British Vogue a few weeks ago about how expensive and, ultimately, performative her £1,000 a month wellness habit was before having a baby. For the piece, she spoke to nutritionist Kat Chan, who shared some further elucidations on her Substack, Full Serving, about how to be well without the ridiculous price tag:

If it brings you real joy, results, and you can comfortably afford it then the gym membership / grocery shop / supplements are worth it. The problem starts when spending is driven by fear and confusion rather than preference. It’s easy to tell when this is the case - there is a level of guilt and dread attached to the experience. Too often, wellness marketing disguises anxiety as self-investment.

If the way you’re looking after yourself isn’t financially sustainable, it probably isn’t a sustainable health habit either. Trying to keep up with everyone else’s wellness routine is one of the quickest ways to make your own feel untenable.

• I’m an insufferable podcast snob, but this four-part series is absolutely

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The court of public opinion, almost every time, supports men in high-profile cases, and Pitt has been the beneficiary of such treatment since accusations were made against him by his ex-wife, Angelina Jolie, and allegedly further qualified by his children. If a woman faced even a handful of the accusations made against Pitt, they would never work again, let alone grace the cover of an international publication (the accusations are publicly available as they were made as part of Jolie’s divorce filing against Pitt in 2016.)

Pitt mentions in his interview how he’s felt suicidal at certain junctions in his life because of “family stuff”, but says almost no more on the subject. I cannot believe how unscathed he and his reputation are, despite what his ex-wife and children have accused him of. Sadly, it’s hardly new news for women to have to witness men lead consequence-free lives, but it will never not frustrate me when publications choose to give such men platforms and validation by virtue of their support. Gross!

Under the paywall today, we really get into the Callum Turner and One Night Only of it all, and I share what is quite possibly the single most heartwarming publishing stories of 2026 so far.

• Emma Cline’s new novel, Switzy, is released on September 8th. I’m half-way through and cannot wait to properly discuss with people (I seriously cannot wait, so if anybody’s read a proof, please DM me.) For those who are Cline-curious, who haven’t got an early copy, or are just desperate to know more, there’s an excerpt of Switzy published in this week’s New Yorker.

• Oh, to be a publicist currently working for Mr. Dua Lipa this week. Things seem to be going from bad to worse for Callum Turner’s latest rom-com One Night Only, which, just a few days after its release, has garnered a pretty poor rating of 44% on Rotten Tomatoes.

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My beloved mum has not been very well, which has required my time, care and attention; other relatives close to me have also not been well, which has also required my time, care and attention; and I’m planning a wedding, which is fast approaching.

In fact, it’s so fast approaching that we have a meeting with our rabbi this week to finalise plans for our ceremony and wedding day. And this weekend, I will head off somewhere (I don’t know where) with my lovely, lovely cohort of girlfriends for my hen party. Life comes at you, and fast!

I’ve been non-stop reading this weekend (I cannot wait for the new Emma Cline novel to be released so I can discuss it with everybody, I’m half-way through and adoring it), so I hope you enjoy this densely-packed dispatch. There’s Yesteryear commentary! Ariana commentary! You name it, we’ve got it. Enjoy!

• To be totally transparent, I found a lump in my breast last week. I booked an appointment with the GP who confirmed the lump and has referred me for further biopsies and examinations this week, but it occurred to me that I have never “checked” my breasts before. I’ve just assumed they’re fine. Turns out this Labour MP, Claire Hughes, experienced the same thing, per this interview in The Times — and hers turned out to be an aggressive form of breast cancer. We take so much for granted with our health, and if I can implore any person reading this to do anything today, it’s to have a feel of your boobs! The doc told me we should be doing it once a month.

• Of all the years not to be at the Fringe, I’m upset to not be bearing witness to Amanda Knox’s one-woman comedy show, Cartwheel, which is dividing opinions, left and right. For those too young to remember or just none-the-wiser, Knox and her then Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted in 2009 for the murder and sexual assault of Meredith Kercher, a British foreign exchange student living in Perugia. They maintained their innocence and, after years of legal battles, were acquitted in 2015. The critics appear to be unimpressed by Cartwheel, but a social clip I watched from Sky News polled audience members after watching it and they all found it sad, powerful, funny and touching. Unsurprisingly, the snowballing press around it has resulted in a sell-out run for Knox, which is definitely no small feat, particularly given there’s a petition with 9,000 signatures, calling for it to be removed from the Fringe line-up.

• I conducted one of the first interviews with Caro Claire Burke for her debut novel Yesteryear in 2025 as part of the ELLE x Soho House book club, and she amazed me. Off the record, she was so candid about the machinations of publishing her first

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I must be honest: I’ve been in such a hole for the past couple of days that this story really slipped through the net for me, but a friend brought it to my attention yesterday and now I can’t stop thinking about it.

ICYMI, Arday claimed to have completed 30 marathons in 35 days as well as running 600 miles in six days, and raising £5m for charity over several years. The Telegraph also reported that an analysis had found more than 100 passages in his PhD were similar to another thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a student at Brunel University in London, published six years earlier. An investigation by Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded Arday his PhD in 2015, did not uphold the charges of plagiarism but said they were probably caused by “honest and reasonable error”.

It’s all fascinating, and this Guardian long-read is well worth diving into if you’re also not up to speed with the controversy. The act of embellishing your successes feels totally alien to me, but you can understand how, in the warped world that we live in where proximity to power is the ultimate goal, it’s potentially becoming more commonplace. Arday has denied all wrongdoing, I must add. Jason Okundaye has also written a brilliant op-ed on it, also for The Guardian, here.

• As the only child of a single mother, I have long found myself fascinated with mother-daughter stories. Any novel, article, podcast or film that portrays the dance of co-dependence between a mother and her daughter is a novel, article, podcast or film I’ll likely have engaged with, or will engage with. But I’ve never heard it described as a reflection of “the mother wound”, which I discovered this week in Tell The Bees’ Substack interview with debut novelist Stacey Yu (whose novel Kitten is out now.) I finished Rachel Cusk’s Life of M yesterday (my thoughts below) and am now embarking on Kitten, so I’ll report back.

  “I think the mother wound is eternal and ancient as anything, and because of that there are infinite ways to tell its story. The way the mother wound is explored is revealing of where we are culturally.

  When I wrote Kitten, I wanted to craft a mother-daughter relationship that was grounded in age-old anxieties (codependence, jealousy) while integrating the specifics of regional differences and class and race anxieties today. Katie’s mother immigrated from China when she was a little girl, and while Katie was raised in America, she inherits, to some degree, her mother’s sense of out-of-placeness; their relationships to misbelonging both unite and polarise them.”

• Alex Jones is a brilliant journalist and I found her recent essay for her Substack, on the recently-reported impact of c-sections on a person’s future fertility, very interesting. I had no idea that a c-section, now the most common means of delivery in the UK, could have any sort of bearing on a person’s ability to get pregnant in the future. She name-checks Ariel Levy’s beautiful memoir The Rules Do Not Apply (where, while on assignment in Mongolia, Levy’s baby died in her arms at 19 weeks old) and quotes from a piece in The Times, written by Cathy Adams, which I’ll share here, too:

  “Women are warned of myriad risks before they choose to have the procedure — blood clots, organ damage, uterine rupture — but the official Nice guidelines do not mention an impact on future fertility, which to me now seems outrageous. I was cautioned only to try to wait 18 months before having another child, to give my uterine wall time to recover. What no one mentioned was that the c-section could cause a defect in my womb that might bring about secondary infertility.”

• Okay, let’s discuss Life of M. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Rachel Cusk

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I met another friend just before, too, who I met at her office. As I waited for her, a young girl with two butterfly clips either side of her head like we used to wear in the 2000s, stood waiting by the lift, amber eyes shining with excitement. When a woman, presumably her boss, came out and welcomed her, she congratulated the young girl as their latest intern, and it reminded me again of how exciting, nerve-wracking and world-altering starting afresh can be. Two opposite ends of the spectrum, but I found myself looking fondly upon the younger girl, as she stood, beaming and flattening her shirt, in front of her new boss. It’s easy to forget that we were all a version of her once upon a time.

I often find that as we inevitably whiz through August, we find ourselves confronted with the back-to-school feeling of September, where life resumes its solemnity and seriousness and suddenly we’re looking down the barrel towards the end of the year. I hope that you, like this young girl and my friend, manage to find some sense of joy in whatever it is you’re doing or working on. It’s sometimes hard to remember among the noise, but life really is a string of new beginnings for all of us.

Under the paywall today is a fantastic piece examining Ariana Grande’s fanbase (and drawing interesting parallels between hers and Britney’s), a podcast that unintentionally dances around privilege and Emma Grede disease (desperate to discuss this with somebody), as well as a string of other goodies. Enjoy!

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I’ve spoken — and written — before about how taste is subjective, what one person loves another may hate and vice versa. That difference is the spice of life, but to hear powerful women in the media — who dictate what is catapulted to relevance, what is endorsed as worthy by their outlets — degrade a genre of television that has — in so many ways, rightly or wrongly — democratised and created careers for people from every conceivable walk of life, feels immoral.

Needless to say, then, that the anti-reality TV piece I shared yesterday has been playing on my mind a lot. So many salient and well-made points, and yet I’ve found myself ruminating on all of the ways I think it missed out on the way that reality TV has created opportunities for people who may not otherwise have been afforded them. It’s probably with that in mind that I pursued all of the podcasts and articles I consumed as I thought about it.

Under the paywall today are a string of recommendations that speak to the quagmire of living a life online, as a housewife, as an influencer, and as a person existing in a world where both dominate popular culture. Plus, I’ve got a new book on the go!

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While I have no medical answers, I did find salvation in the form of my wonderful, wonderful friends this weekend. The sun was shining, not as aggressively as it has been, but gently and subtly, and so I spent time in the Chilterns with some of my best friends, one of whom has just moved there. We laughed, walked, pottered, ate, drank and, to employ the use of my favourite verb, mooched till our hearts were content. I hope you all had equally as whimsy weekends, too.

Under the paywall today is the best — and I truly mean the most tender, heart wrenching, moving — coming-of-age film I’ve ever seen, a classic book that I want everybody to read and a string of article recommendations. Enjoy!

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I had an ultrasound yesterday, which I’m hopeful will give me some answers as to the cause of the bleeding, but until then it’s just more rest, sleep and, well, rest. A famously bad patient, I accidentally (purposefully) gave the oven a deep clean this week because I couldn’t bear the idea of staying in bed for so long.

Anyway, the one silver lining is how much culture I’ve been soaking up and basking in. Podcasts! Articles! Films! TV shows! This is everything I’ve loved, including a few podcasts that I loved so much I’ve recommended them to everybody.

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Happy Odyssey weekend, one and all! I stumbled into a bit of a Christopher Nolan hole this weekend, watching and reading old interviews with him, which I love because of how much rejection he dealt with at the beginning of his career (imagine being one of those people to have rejected his applications to, say, film school.)

As a freelancer you are often subject to so much self-doubt and so much rejection that it can slowly erode your confidence in your own abilities, but I love hearing success stories of those who just stick with it. An adage I often throw around is that the most successful person in any room is often the one who outlasts the rest. Talent or connections may open the door, but resilience, tenacity and drive keep you in the room.

If you’re somebody launching something new (well done, you!) or continuing to chip away at something you’ve been building for a while, don’t give up. Every person we revere as a society has faced rejection, and it’s almost always a case of the last man standing.

Under the paywall today is the Instagram account I’ve become obsessed with (and don’t doubt that you will too), a couple of long-reads that blew my mind, and few other bits. Enjoy!

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One year ago, I felt trapped in a job that was slowly eroding every ounce of joy and fulfilment I’d once felt about my work. Journalism is a vocation — something I actively pursued from the age of 17, studied and developed over the course of my degree, and have continued to hone across a decade-long career. The industry and the parameters of my job had changed, and I felt trapped, questioning daily what I was going to do. So I took a risk and left the safety and security of the job that I’d worked so hard to get, and plunged into the unknown, hoping a parachute would appear.

There is something invigorating about being on the cusp of something with my work that’s similar but also entirely different — something that, once again, makes me feel like that 17-year-old wannabe journalist — the one who wanted to leap out of bed in the morning. I feel so excited.

Under the paywall today is a belated bumper cultural dispatch (I haven’t stopped since Wednesday so I’m sorry for my delay!) It includes a Prince Harry legal deep dive (what has he done?), the real-life inspiration behind the book of last year, Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, and a fantastic podcast episode about the ever-exhaustive culture of self-optimisation (yawn).

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Does anybody else find that choosing paint colours is borderline impossible? I would identify as a decisive and sure person on the whole but put me in front of a display of paints and I turn to mush. It’s like my brain can’t quite compute the bounty of options that lie before me. The blues that become greens, the creams that become yellows, the pinks that become reds.

I say all of this because I’m in the midst of the torturous task of deciding what to paint our living room (dare I say the most important room in the house?) and I am making it difficult for myself by virtue of the fact that I keep buying, sampling and deciding against paints. We’ve tried grey, beige, pink, greige and today, confronted with the most fabulous array of Little Green Company paints, I chose a very pale, and admittedly very pretty, green. Watch this space to see how this turns out.

Under the paywall today is Aftersun director Charlotte Wells’ latest creation (I watched it twice the whole way through), yet another fantastic take on the normalisation of plastic surgery in society and the best podcast I’ve heard yet on the conflation of male infertility and toxic masculinity.

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I’ve been working on a project (yes, another elusive, yet-to-be-named project) that I’m so excited to share with the world. Well, hopefully the world will care, but at the very least my mother, best friend and fiancé will, so that’s a world of three I suppose.

The project in question requires me to consume even more culture than I do every day generally, hence today’s meaty list of everything I’ve consumed. That’s my favourite thing about culture, actually; you can think, or assume, that you’ve seen it all, watched it all, that you know exactly what you like, and then bam! Somebody points you in another direction or introduces something else to you, and it’s like a portal to a whole new world.

That’s sort of what happened to me yesterday, and that’s why today’s dispatch is a meaty one. Enjoy!

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And then an England win! A euphoric England win, during which I once again found myself drowning in beer, my head unavoidably stuffed into a sea of sweaty armpits. The euphoria of England fans when they win will never get old and, yes, there are so many other things I’d rather we collectively got excited about — voting! protesting! — but these rare slivers of togetherness feel even more special in the splintered times we live in, so I choose to take the win.

Under the paywall today is a podcast you absolutely have GOT to listen to (just trust me), the four-part documentary I watched all in one sitting, the book I’m currently reading (and loving) and a string of other bits and bobs. Enjoy!

• I first encountered the work of the poet and author Cecilia Knapp during the pandemic, when I read her debut poetry collection Peach Pig. It’s an absolutely beautiful body of work — unpretentious and tender, like a gentle lyrical dance. Her ability to form the most sinuous sentences about grief and motherlessness truly amazes me and, true to form, her debut novel Little Boxes and her forthcoming novel Lack are every bit as good as I’d hoped. Lack, in fact, is fantastic — and very au courant — so I’m thrilled to be hosting an evening with Knapp in her native Brighton on Thursday, July 24. You can grab your tickets here.

• I wrote for The Guardian in 2023 about how sanitised celebrity documentaries have become, owing in large part to the producer credits that celebrities now demand before signing on (if you’re a producer, you get sign-off on the finished product). I can’t remember the last time I watched a celebrity documentary and

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I spent today running around Mayfair trying to find us a wedding venue. I can’t remember if I’ve shared this in this little sliver of a confessional I get to indulge myself in every day, but the wedding venue we’d booked for our ceremony in just a few months’ time, cancelled on us. Their landlord, they’ve claimed, is asking them to move out. And so, we were kicked to the curb and forced to find somewhere else at, in wedding terms, fairly late notice.

The silver lining, however, is that I found time to dip in and out of the galleries peppered along Dover Street, housed in some of London’s most exquisite buildings. I forgot that so many of those galleries are free to enter and host some of the most fabulous, pint-sized exhibitions. Richard Saltoun Gallery, for example, is hosting a selection of works from Ree Morton, a New Yorker whose work has been included in the Whitney Biennial before. There’s just enough of her pieces displayed that you get a real feel for how her work distorts society’s understandings of femininity. Just a little hop and skip down Dover Street the other way is David Zwirner, which is currently hosting the works of portrait artist Steven Shearer, whose textured and emotional body of work is really striking. While at risk of sounding completely twee, it made me feel proud to live in a city with so much culture.

Under the paywall today are the bridal must-watch movies that I’m currently making my way through, why BookTok may not be the saving grace for publishing that we thought it was, and people are finally defying body optimisation culture! Hurrah! Also, ICYMI, Justin Baldoni has posted an Instagram video responding to the outcome of his and Blake Lively’s lawsuits. I have so many thoughts and I’m so curious to know what you think.

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When I left my job in December, I left with no plan, just the knowledge that nothing in my life was going to change unless I made a change myself. So I left, and hoped — as I suppose many people do — that my next move would become clear.

Work aside, leaving my job has made me a better human all-round; I’m a better partner, better friend, better daughter, better worker and a better neighbour. Across the road from us lives Martin, our 79-year-old neighbour, whose wife died years ago. He lives by himself and, by his own admission, is lonely. He told my fiancé and me that days will go by without him speaking to anybody. And so, as the boss of my own business — total employees: one, and it’s me — I have adapted my morning schedule. I now drink my morning coffee with Martin in his garden while he talks to me about his life, his family and his love of science, before he goes for his daily swim. It brings me so much joy to play a small part in his day — hopefully a part that brings him just a modicum more joy, too. I suppose I say all of this to say: when you take a second to come up for air from the relentless pursuit of whatever it is you’re striving for, you start to see the world around you properly and wholly. And truly, nothing is more beautiful.

I go on a few tangents today — about Ozempic, rage-baiting and the pressure on women to conform. Forgive me; I promise there are some cracking recommendations woven in there too.

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I believe wholeheartedly that I cracked the freelance code yesterday when I, on a whim, booked a ticket to see The Invite at my local cinema. I couldn’t tell you the last time I went to the cinema purely for pleasure (one of the stranger side effects of doing what you love for a living), so it felt refreshing to revel in the freedom of being in charge of your own day.

An unexpected, but no less valued, result of going to the cinema on a 32-degree day was the air conditioning, which I’d completely forgotten floods every cinema. I’m not sure my sweaty back has ever been so relieved (if a back can be relieved).

Under the paywall today are my honest thoughts on The Invite (I have lots of them), the first-ever tradwife reality TV show (just when you think you’ve seen it all!), and a few more pieces worth looking at.

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