I’m back from an extended break—turns out it’s a lot harder to maintain your SubStack when you’re no longer unemployed.

Here’s my review of Charli XCX’s latest album, Music, Fashion, Film. Hoping to share more of these shorter pieces going forward!

Also, some writing updates: I’ve been fortunate to now write several articles for Austin’s fabulous lifestyle magazine, TRIBEZA. I also recently had an art review come out with Visual Anthropology Review. You can locate my latest articles on my website.

Ok, thank you! More soon!

I’m not a bad girl anymore (I promise!)

Wow, Charli XCX snarls on “Rock Music,” and tart transforms to earnest.

I’m really banging my head. I’m really hurting my ne-Eck, she trills over ultra-processed guitars. The nerve damage is real, but it’s the only way to feel.

“Rock Music,” the opening track and lead single from Charli XCX’s latest album, Music, Fashion, Film, implores listeners to throw their whole bodies into music. Charli and her friends cry, kiss each other, and hurt themselves, and it feels anthemic, even artful. The dancefloor is dead, Charli cheekily proclaims, inciting inevitable comparisons to “The Moment” that was Brat, So, now we’re making roooo-ck music.

Music, Fashion, Film, however, is not a “rock album,” as Charli clarified, nor is it, I would posit, the “anti-Brat,” as some critics have touted. Instead, the project is an extension of Charli’s talent for crafting a mood and promptly distorting it, as recently evidenced on her atmospheric companion album for Emerald Fennel’s “Wuthering Heights” (which I found infinitely more convincing than the film itself). Sonically, M,F,F blends grunge pop guitar with addictive glitchiness that does, in fact, make me want to bang my head.

^ Why “Wuthering Heights,” a disaster of a film, even outside of its obvious infidelity to the original text (maybe more on that later? Lmk), couldn’t have just been an extended music video IDK.

The album’s cover gathers three artistic icons—the Velvet Underground’s John Cale, fashion designer Marc Jacobs, and director Martin Scorsese—posed together in black and white. “I was like, ‘Wow, these three people mean so much to me personally as an artist.’” Charli shared in an interview with BBC 6 Music. “And I couldn’t believe that they were all together, you know?”

The image pronounces MFF’s investment in artistic legacy, while also, perhaps, asserting Charli herself as an auteur.

Auteur theory—which develops from 1950s French film criticism, but has since been applied to other artforms—situates directors as films’ unequivocal authors. Auteurs merge theme, vision, and aesthetic to generate what might be called a “signature style” or atmosphere.

Critics of auteur theory take issue with its reification of the singular genius trope. Can an artist be an iconic auteur and a good-faith collaborator? Charli seems to think so, dedicating an entire song on M,F,F to longtime conspirator, A.G. Cook (“Magic Metal Montana”).

What might auter-ship look like when driven by collectivity?

^ Trailer for The 400 Blows, dir. by François Truffaut, a New Wave French director, who also developed auteur theory. I vividly remember watching this movie in high school French class and being almost unbearably moved by the final scene, where the boy runs out to the ocean.

The body—in its gore, grit, and impermanence—might provide a path forward. Returning to “Rock Music,” Charli’s repeated emphasis on the “real” fact of her body—her banging head, hurting neck, and nerve damage—suggests a turn away from abstraction (without, I might add, sacrificing Charli’s quintessentially experimental, warbled sound). In an era of accelerated artificial intelligence, of mega-disembodiment gone corporate, the pop star extols literally jumping off the stage and, later, invokes our shared mortality. “Some artists have created art that has really survived thousands of years,” body horror auteur David Cronenberg intonates on M,F,F’s closing track, “No One Lasts Forever.” “And that’s fantastic, but experientially, for them, they are dead, they are gone, they are not experiencing that.”

Since our great artists are no longer “experiencing” their work, M,F,F seems to argue, we might as well take it in for them—savor it with the five senses they no longer possess. Of course, there’s a limit to indulging in art for sensations’ sake, which Charli investigates on “Card Declined,” a song on which fashion’s promise of escapism gives way to hollow overconsumption.

Charli further explores how, sometimes, playing pop-star pretend is the best way to “feel… really real” on “2007” (my favorite track along with single, “SS26”). The song calls to mind Britney Spears’s 2007 pop masterpiece, Blackout , which Charli cited as her pop bible before the album’s critical renaissance. Spears’s Blackout was, in part, about pushing artifice so far that it becomes real. On the album, Britney mingles pleasure with self-alienation, claiming a defiant distance between herself and the audience through stylized fragmentation.

Charli is up to something similar here—on “Camera” she wonders if it’s “fucking stupid to “try to be a girl on the screen” at thirty-four; still, she can’t deny “how it makes [her] feel,” “inspired and alive,” like she can “be anything” she wants to be. Through playing pretend, Charli channels a feeling that’s “dangerous,” “totally honest,” and real. I’m reminded of Miranda July’s listless and liberatory novel, All Fours, in which a perimenopausal woman accesses truth through fantasy, first, through an affair in a remodeled hotel suite, and, then, with her husband, as they reckon with their marriage through elaborate roleplay.

Like July, albeit in a different context, Charli taps into the reality found in performance; sometimes the “act,” or the “wink,” when pushed to its excess, is truer and more revelatory than the unstudied life offstage. When Charli spirals out on “I’m Afraid”—questioning her personas of wife, kid, artist, and bitch—she implies that we’re all always simultaneously many characters, anyway.

Music, Fashion, Film, with its Criterion Collection credibility and anti-marketing ethos, could be readily accused of pretentiousness, particularly after Brat’s commercial success. It’s interesting, though, to consider what “pretension” actually means. Ambition is the shared thread across each of “pretension””s definitions: a pretentious person may be putting on (annoying) delusional airs, but they are aspiring towards their own definition of greatness. Music, Fashion, Film, upon first listen, suggests that pop music is an artistic genre worthy of highbrow distinction—it then concludes with a celebrated auteur telling us that “nothing lasts forever,” not even, really, art.

Pitchfork reviewer, Anna Gaca, connects that existentialism to climate grief. “In this endless season of international heatwaves, floods, fire, and smoke… It’s not going to matter what it says on the label,” she writes. Absolutely. Music, Fashion, Film balances that fact—one that belies our self-absorbed and short-sighted frivolity—with an honest belief in the value of performance itself.

When “nothing is going to save us, not music, fashion, or film,” perhaps the best thing to do is to give oneself over completely—to art, to friends, to sensation, and to creation, which is, after all, the antithesis of death, even in its stunning futility.

Thanks for reading! I’m planning to release a mid-year “7 things I hated in pop culture this year” next Sunday, and, then, later, “7 things I loved,'“ if y’all would be interested (then I can elaborate on my thoughts on “Wuthering Heights” briefly lol).

Also, I’ll share some stuff from my recent travels :)

Ok, that’s it! Thanks again <3

Love,

Jen

I hope you have been finding moments of joy and rest in what has already been a heavy and eventful year.

I’m deciding to share an essay that I wrote awhile back here, if mostly for the reason that many of the events it recounts now feel, finally, far away. The words I wrote still feel like me, but the girl who lived them belongs to another time. And with that distance, I can finally feel something like love for her.

This essay recounts my post-grad years in Chicago from 2017-2019. It contains descriptions of sexual assault, so please read with care. It’s also filled with real moments of wonder and love and, I hope, captures the complexity of that era of my life.

In other news, I have a piece out with Tribeza on the Honkytonk Catwalk, a really special event in Austin, which showcases some truly spectacular small fashion businesses. Read it here!

Near Totality

2017 Jen at my Chicago apartment on Waveland Ave.

My time in Chicago commences with a staring contest: me versus a total solar eclipse. It’s a bit one-sided: only one of us has the power to blind the other.

My friend Rian and I treat the event with occasion, using the sun and moon’s meeting as an excuse to day drink and loop “Total Eclipse of the Heart” loudly off of our phones while we get ready. Chicago is not in the eclipse’s “path of totality,” which beams from Oregon to South Carolina. In the path of totality, the moon blocks the sun entirely. Here in Chicago, it covers ninety percent, ten percent of the sun’s circumference stubbornly peeking through.

The morning of the eclipse, the Adler Planetarium staff posts maps of its route around the lawn. The eclipse carves its own highway from Portland to Charleston: at twenty-one, right out of college, I had never been to either. I hadn’t even been to the West Coast. Volunteers pass out cardboard sunglasses that read: “All Eyes on the Sky.” We look up and wait.

If you had asked me then, I would have said my life felt like that: standing in place, slightly intoxicated, hoping something spectacular would happen.

It was the summer of 2017, and I had spent the past year acting like I was on fire: I went out constantly and home regularly with boys I met outside bars; I marched in political rallies, protesting against the president until my voice went hoarse and my feet went numb. I drove my ’02 Honda Accord across the middle of the country in a series of poorly planned road-trips, I look back and wonder how I had so much energy. In those days, I perpetually willed myself into transformation, thinking that if I applied enough pressure, I could leave the things I held in my body behind. Or else, I could run myself so ragged I wouldn’t care what happened to it anymore.

I moved to Chicago to slow down and because it seemed like the adult choice to make. “It’s the next right thing,” I told anyone who asked, borrowing a phrase I’d heard from a career counselor. In many ways, it felt fated: both my Dad and my college mentor, Dr. J, lived here in their early twenties. Dr. J’s old apartment was only a few blocks from my new one, and I was convinced my time in the city was a rite of passage.

Staring up at the eclipse, I feel a sense of peace and arrival enter me. I’d made it. During the days prior, right after I moved in, the sky droned with missile-like sounds from the Chicago Air and Water Show’s jet flyers. I thought we were getting bombed. But, now, the air was quiet.

The grass scratches softly at the backs of my thighs, flushing them red, while I stare into the city, the lake and its rivers reflected into the tall buildings, casting them beryl-blue. Normally I’d be in one of those towers, performing office temp work while I searched for my first “real job” post-grad. I look up at the eclipse and, for an instant, I don’t agonize over the full-time position I don’t have yet or calculate how many temp assignments I need to make next month’s rent. Instead, I let myself gaze back and forth from sky to city to lake, wondering what this next chapter will hold and who I, inside of it, will be.

---

And so, a week after the eclipse, I have it—my first real job. I can add “Travel Company Copywriter” to the top of my resume, proudly stamped above my years at my college town’s deli counter and my family’s small trucking business. During my final round interview, my future bosses tell me to take out my nose ring. Their office adheres to a strict dress code policy. I make a removal appointment at the piercing shop down the street. My grandma mails me her old pencil skirts.

My apartment is right off the Addison Red Line stop, home to the Chicago Cubby Bears and their legions of beer-soaked fans, myself occasionally included. It’s an old building, our landlord, “flip-phone Jim,” is giving me and my roommate a great deal.

The day I move in, a drunk man in a Cubs jersey follows me into my apartment. He trails behind me and my cardboard boxes up the building’s first flight of carpeted stairs and through my open apartment door. He wordlessly sits down on my futon. My dad warmly, yet firmly, escorts the man outside to wait for his friends. Nothing bad happened, I reassure myself later, but when I recall the man following me up the building’s steps and crossing through my front door, I feel violated.

Every night the El barrels inches from my ear and its florescent glare refracts into my bedroom window. Late-night passengers can spy me through the train’s plexiglass, see my resting form folded inside a thin floral bedspread, petals peeling off in strips of cotton fabric. I start training my body to sleep through the train’s rattles and howls, to remain unbothered by strangers’ eyes, the stories they might write from their split-second glances into my cramped bedroom. I miss my college apartment that I shared with my best friend, Brenton. Now, a block over, I hear the crack of an aluminum bat. The crowd goes wild.

---

Every morning, I take the Red Line into work and when the train sinks underground something in me sinks, too. My throat closes. A fierce pit in my stomach flips it cold.

There’s no such thing as personal space on the El at 8:30AM, I learn. Bodies cram against me, and I have to snake my arm through them grasp metal railing. I must get to the office before 9AM, because that’s when the office administrator slides the attendance sheet back into her desk drawer. If I can’t sign in, my supervisor will chastise me. When I walk across the office, everyone will stare at me and know I was late.

A couple months into our post-grad existential crises, Brenton and I readily admit we’re having trouble adjusting. Brenton graduated with me and is living at home while he saves up money to move to California. We stay up late on FaceTime, pouring $3 bottles of wine into coffee mugs, playing pop music across our unstable WiFi connections, and pausing our conversations when, every 20 minutes, yet another Northbound train threatens to crash through my window. I often end up falling asleep on these phone calls, lulled to safety by Brenton on the other line, his familiar warmth a protective balm over me. Sometimes, I hold my laptop up to show Brenton the full glow of the moon from my bedroom window. Three Wishes wine lines my mattress’s perimeter, and there’s nothing on my shelf of the fridge but leftover Pad Thai and half-empty Pedialyte.

---

Working at a travel company isn’t as glamourous as it sounds.

First of all, as has been made abundantly clear, I will not be doing any traveling. Secondly, my job is mostly switching out stale adjectives. When I try to raise more serious concerns—that our brochures’ descriptions of Asian destinations as “exotic” and “mystical” are inappropriate, for example—I’m brushed off. “But our clients do want to travel somewhere exotic,” the company founder’s wife, explains. I can’t believe that “this is just how we do things” is an actual argument out in the “real world.” “Remember, we’re selling luxury and know-how,” she reminds me. The founder’s wife is a spindly woman who dresses up as Coco Chanel every year for the office’s Halloween contest. She draws big, cursive-like triangles in red ink to signify “change” over parts of copy she doesn’t like. The inside of her office looks like a giant fabergé egg. When I first try to quit (over the “exotic” debacle, amongst other things), she runs my resignation letter through her paper shredder. It feels like a calculated move to humiliate me—to prove that my dogged idealism is not just doomed, but irrelevant.

Corporate America is teaching me new ways to be looked at and new ways to disappear. I’m the youngest girl in my office, and I enjoy playing the ingenue role. That is, I do until a coworker confides a lewd joke people are saying, which involves me being from rural Ohio, Forrest Gump, and fucking someone in a cornfield. I grow more self-conscious after that. I’m well-aware my hand-me-down office outfits aren’t the “right” kind. I feel them itch and pinch my sides in my cubicle, but they are all I have to wear.

---

By winter, I haven’t quite mastered how to behave in the office, but I’m getting better at navigating train cars. There’s a careful choreography in a space so packed with bodies; there are covert codes about where you should stand and which part of the handrail is yours to grasp.

One morning, a man corners me in the train car and violates these rules. He presses me past other bodies into the train’s metal wall. Soon, my whole front is crushed. He starts to forcibly grind against my back. Bobs into me, his erection against my grandma’s grey pencil skirt. More movement. Hammering. I can’t see him. Just feel. Then, he gets off.

A woman near me asks if I’m ok; I say thank you. When, one stop later, I step onto the El platform, the air is cold. I walk, without music, to my office. The city is, for once, without sound.

This sort of thing had happened to me before, but never in broad daylight.

Once in my cubicle, I have a hard time piecing together this girl, the one sitting here, typing on her monitor, with the girl on the train, and further yet, with another girl, the one passed out at parties past, found unconscious in bar bathrooms and boys’ beds. I look down at my body and I fracture to think that it is mine, that my own frame can feel so near and far apart from me.

Two months ago, I visited Brenton in Cleveland for New Year’s. We decided to go to a party at some boys’ place—friends of friends. Brenton and I get separated after midnight. He wakes up with our friends, and I wake up alone at the boys’ apartment. When Brenton finds me that morning, I’m in white sheets stained with blood, hair matted, an ache between my thighs. Because of my birth control, an implant I’ve had since my first-year of college, I don’t get a regular period; I really don’t know what happened to me, but I hurt—whatever transpired involved force.

I learn that I hooked up with a lot of guys the night before—or, more aptly, they hooked up with me—some in groups and some alone; I couldn’t pick them out of a line-up. The last thing I remember is one pushing my head down towards his crotch. Later, I remember his pale white stomach, its absence of hair. In a rush to leave in the morning, I grab the wrong leather jacket; it’s freezing cold outside, there’s record snow. My shoe gets stuck in ice as I climb into the car. I have to go back to the boys’ apartment that day—my missing phone and wallet turned up while they were cleaning. One of the boys tries to guess my name; he’s wrong, his friends snicker. “Hey, wanna buy me new sheets?” Their laughter rings through the hallway as I shut the apartment door.

A few days later, I hear through the grapevine the boys want their jacket back. I mail it with office candy, offered as an apology. The boys don’t say thank you, and they don’t say sorry.

---

Another year passes. I get another job, a better one, where they listen to me when I say something is orientalist.

My roommate, a close friend from high school, moves to St. Louis to join a dance company, taking her signed Misty Copeland poster with her. Flip-phone Jim, true to his nature, lets me stay in the same unit at a fraction of the price. “You’re a good tenant,” he says, while I sit across from him in his house, his children playing loudly in the other room, “I don’t want things to be harder on you than they have to be.”

Back at the apartment, I am shocked at how stark the white walls are, how hollowed out and empty my apartment feels without another life inside of it. My anxiety amplifies, and I begin to define myself as alone; I struggle to take care of myself, going for months without restocking toilet paper or washing the sheets. The trains screech by. I wonder where I’m meant to go.

---

That summer, right after my roommate moves out, Dr. J, Brenton’s and my beloved college mentor, passes away suddenly. The day he dies, I walk the city all day until my feet blister and bleed—past his old apartment, my favorite hushed streets, and all down the lake.

Brenton and I travel to Atlanta for Dr. J’s funeral. I hadn’t been before, and I haven’t been back since. Dr. J was a queer Black male role model for Brenton; even as Brenton and I share our grief, I know his is distinct from mine in ways I will never understand. We meet at the Southwest terminal of Midway airport and order Rum and Cokes in Dr. J’s honor. We split a pair of headphones on the plane, drifting in and out of sleep to Ariana Grande.

It was in Dr. J’s classroom that I first soberly and plainly named my own past experiences of sexual violation. Dr. J saw me and, in that seeing, he gave me the bravery to speak. From him, I started to believe that you could hold all the versions of yourself, that they were each real and not in contradiction with one another—a project of self-forgiveness I found more impossible than ever in the year leading up to and following his death.

That night at our Airbnb’s pool, with cold cans of beer and gas station hot dogs cradled in our arms, Brenton and I put our legs in the warm water. In the quiet, thick night of Atlanta’s heat, we listen to Dr. J’s favorite music from our phones, streaming Lemonade and “Landslide.” We are trying to bring him back. We are trying to remember what he saw in us.

---

I attempt to numb my grief and distrust of my own body. My panic attacks on the train get so bad that I start driving to work and skipping lunch so I can afford to park downtown. I take up hot yoga and push my body to its limit so my sweat hardens in the wind and bites at my dry skin. When other students try to talk to me, I bristle. When instructors offer me hands-on assists, I shatter under their touch.

I resolve to apply to graduate school, as Dr. J always encouraged, and spend most nights isolated, reading over my applications until my sight blurs, reminding myself of Dr. J’s belief in me to keep me going. I imagine I can touch his generosity through the texts he left me. I clutch at their words.

I develop an anxious habit of checking my locks, compulsively pacing between my front and back doors. I listen for intruders and swear I hear footsteps; I awake paralyzed, fabricating a man looming over me. I am frightened of my body, disgusted by all the hands that have laid claim to it—one night, I make myself puke by my bedside so hard that my vomit covers my entire extension cord. Exhausted, I pass out right afterwards. The outlet starts smoking, filling my nose with a strange scent. I don’t wake for 16 hours, and it takes me several days to clean up the mess I made, the rotting pile large enough for Red Line passengers to see through my window. I can’t bring myself to care what they might think of me anymore.

---

That next New Year’s I go back to Cleveland. My desire to rinse the year off with Brenton, whose been beside me through it, outweighs my qualms about returning.

It’s not snowy this year, but there are near-violent winds coursing through the city, threatening to knock us over each time we step outside. “Winds of change,” we keep saying, half-kidding, half-wishing. We end up a giant warehouse party, one more suited to Brooklyn than Northeast Ohio. A year ago we would have followed its crowds’ revelry, but this year when it turns midnight, Brenton and I just sit on a wooden bench, taking the end of the year in. We made it. I am taken back to the solar eclipse when I first moved to Chicago: that hopeful feeling of being on the precipice of something, heightened by a painful need to let go of something else.

On the drive home, I keep falling asleep at the wheel. I try to play music so loudly, roll my windows down so completely, that noise and air stir me awake. It doesn’t work. I drift lanes in the dark. I call my Dad, and he begs me: “Jenny, please pull over,” he’s crying, “You’re scaring me, please pull over.” The terror in his voice jolts me, kicking in a willingness to fight for my life that had laid dormant the past year. Maybe longer.

I book a roadside hotel room for the night and though I can’t sleep fully—I keep checking that the door is really locked—I know I made a change in choosing to get my car off the road. I know that until recently I would have let it crash.

---

That spring, my long nights pay off: I get in to graduate school in Boston. Before leaving Chicago, I stop by the apartment where Dr. J lived in his early twenties one last time. I stare at his building and wonder about his first years post-grad, how they were different and similar to Brenton’s and mine. How did he survive? Did he find solace on the same side streets as me—did he know the sweet joy of speeding down a wide-open Lakeshore Drive? What music did he play on repeat and who did he miss? Which of his friends did he lose and which kept him sane? I want, so badly, to ask him.

Brenton is ready to move to California, and I, of course, help him drive there. Together, we cross the threshold into new, hard-won adventures. We maneuver Nebraska’s flat expanse until the Rocky Mountains erupt in front of us. From the passenger seat, I suddenly understand why people go West to start anew, why some say the cliffs are carved by gods.

At the end of that week, once Brenton’s settled in his new L.A. apartment, we sit out on his screened-in porch. “I think Dr. J would be very proud of us,” he says, knowing my next long drive will be to the East Coast for grad school. “We have a lot of bicoastal flights in our future.”

--

My Dad and Rian help me move out of my Chicago apartment. I turn the locks on the doors I monitored so many sleepless nights. I drop off Rian at her friend’s house, while my Dad drives ahead, leading me towards my “next right thing,” my furniture and cardboard boxes packed safely in his trailer.

Driving down Lakeshore Drive, I recall how I looked into the skyscrapers that first month, how I wondered where I’d fit. Like a mirror, the city and the lake sometimes spelled disillusionment and despair, sometimes totalizing fear, but they just as often reflected back wonder and relief. I can stare directly into what I thought would annihilate my sight. I know now that I will survive it.

When I return to Chicago years later, I look at my old apartment building and offices like I looked into the city that day of the eclipse. They are part of a story, not pressing down on me, but asking a question.

These days, I sleep deeply at night, and no one outside watches me.

Thanks for reading!

Love,

Jen

Hi! I hope you’re staying warm and safe—there is literal snow on the ground here in Austin, Texas, and I’ve left all my faucets dripping to prevent pipe freeze (Thanks, Dad <3). I wrote most of this reflection on 2016 last week when it was still very much trending, and I wanted to share it here.

My next piece will be about what resolutions can open up, rather than restrict, in conversation with The Cut’s recent article on “friction-maxxing.”

I also wanted to take a moment to reflect on the state-sanctioned violence and incredible activism happening in Minnesota right now. One of my favorite leaders and activists, Brittany Packnett Cunninghan (who I’ve been following since 2014!), shared a Reel on how to help immediately if you are not in MN. I suggest watching this Reel and checking out her whole page. Cunningham highlighted following local journalists and organizer, not just in MN, but in your city; she also encouraged her listeners to continue developing their discernment of political propaganda and to initiate honest conversations, from a place of connection and learning, rather than judgement, with community members who may fall for censored and/or AI-generated political stories. I am holding onto both of these pieces of guidance in particular today.

Ok, now into 2016 (here we go…):

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2016 amnesia?

“the 2016 nostalgia has me in such cognitive dissonance,” my girly Maddie texted me early last Friday. The day before, my BFF (known by some readers by his alias, Schizy) shared a 2016 photo dump featuring some truly harrowing figures from the past (tbt “Satan” #iykyk). Later that day, while opening the vintage store I work at, I blasted and belted Ariana Grande’s Dangerous Woman without apology.

^ My 2016 (and 2026) queen.

In case you missed it, 2016 had a major moment this month. What started as a few Hamilton sing-alongs and Kylie Lip Kit throwbacks transformed into a full-blown social media movement, with nearly every fellow zillennial sharing their archive of #2016pics. Never one to say no to nostalgia, I promptly played along, posting images of myself in the Snapchat dog filter, clutching a bag of Franzia, and clad in a Tumblr-worthy outfit of ripped tights and red flannel.

^ A profoundly 2016 image from my archive.

My friends from college and I reminisce… a lot. Like, to a fault. Still, 2016 is not necessarily a year we yearn for. It was an era in which we all collectively lost our minds over our various situationships (some involving the same boys <3), earnestly subtweeted Drake lyrics, and binge drank in a fashion that’s only vaguely appropriate at age 20 (if then). Finsta ruled, and “i hate u, i love u” was my personal song of the summer. Once the semester started back up, I couldn’t make it through a singular conversation without an RIP Harambe joke. Meanwhile, I dyed my hair dark black and laid on my bedroom floor listening to Frank Ocean’s Blonde on loop, determined to prove to everyone that I was going through it.

^ Traveling to Toronto in the year of Drake’s Views……. powerful. Also, peep my literal apartment keys around my neck <3 Zoey 101 in 2016.

Why has the zeitgeist zoomed in on 2016, of all years? Were the vibes actually iconic, or are we just rewriting history?

Personally, I believe our 2016 nostalgia boils down to one core longing: earnestness.

As many have pointed out, 2016 marked a seismic shift in the political landscape of the U.S. (understatement). Trump’s election—infamously on the night of my 21^st birthday—crystallized an escalating climate of national polarization. It also emboldened members of the alt-right to “seize back” mainstream culture with virulent hostility.

Many people have praised 2016’s simpler social media, citing its informality as a key reason for our nostalgia. While it’s true that TikTok didn’t yet exist, Instagram had just released Stories, and “influencers” were still a nascent concept—not a genuinely viable career path—social media wasn’t without stakes. It’s dangerous to assume that because platforms were less refined in 2016, users weren’t already wielding them as weapons.

2016 was the year that I was first harassed online by so-called “meninists,” who, after locating my tweets supporting safe and legal abortion after the election, flooded my feed with death threats and disparaging comments about my appearance.

Most masqueraded behind Pepe the frog avatars and, thankfully, after blocking certain keywords and switching my account to private, I was able to shake them. Still, from my privileged vantage point, something had irrevocably shifted—the internet was no longer just a creative space for reblogging inspiring “aesthetic” images and reading my favorite writers’ blogs, but rather, a public gathering space that could quickly turn invasive and perilous.

My tiny-violin tale of online harassment mirrors a larger collective shift that began in 2016. When I look back on images from that era—as I’ve done plenty over the past week—I’m startled by my raw earnest, not just politically, but personally. In 2016, I truly believed that Trump’s election was a singular moment in, if not history, then my own life’s story. Over the past ten years, I’ve turned more thoroughly to context—I’ve lost pieces of my pure belief in material change’s possibility and searched for them again and again, as I’ve sought a way to stay clear-eyed and kind without sliding into apathetic disillusionment. A part of me longs for the shock at injustice I felt in 2016, how it stirred me towards purposeful direct action. Injustice is no longer as shocking as it was ten years ago, and, truthfully, it wasn’t all that shocking then. It just felt easier, fiercer, to grab onto it, to rail against it as something tangible, distinct enough to touch.

^ The graduation choker in question.

I earnestly believed many things ten years ago that now fill me with some derision, but mostly wild compassion for the girl I was then. In 2016, I believed my private heartbreaks were the most earth-shattering emotions to ever exist. Now, I know that even the plainest cuts contain layers, that much of what feels agonizingly personal has nothing to do with you, and that time really does heal you just fine after all. I thought wearing a black choker in all my graduation photos was a good idea and drinking gold Four Lokos every Sunday night was cool. I was still fervently Team Kanye, and vaguely clinging onto my vegetarian identity. And yet, maybe even more humbling and awe-inspiring is what’s stayed the same: I still talk to most of my college friends every week, and we’ve made so many (better) memories since 2016; the same postcards from my semester abroad that lined my college apartment bedroom’s walls are proudly pasted into collages in my home now, side-by-side with ephemera from new places and photo strips of new friends.

It’s a gift to be able to reflect on a decade past—to cringe, cackle, and remind ourselves of our own sincerity. We don’t have to turn 2016 into some glossy era that it was not to appreciate it as a time of thresholds: of liberal optimism to radicalized dissent, of adolescence to adulthood, of naiveté to knowledge. AI couldn’t have dreamt up half of what I did in 2016, and perhaps that’s another point: whatever 2016 was, it belongs to each of us completely.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

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Love,

Jen

It’s good to see me, isn’t it?

Thank you for your patience as I’ve been a bit AWOL these past few months. I started a job at Pecos Jane, a vintage shop on the Eastside of Austin, which has been deeply creatively fulfilling, as well as resumed my work as a Teaching Assistant back at Tufts for two classes over the fall semester. I’m thrilled to say I’ll be teaching a class at UT this spring (more on that later).

All that being said, I’ve missed writing this SubStack so freaking much (even if, some weeks, it feels like I’m mostly just writing for myself and my top subscriber, , aka activerlistnerdad).

I don’t feel like myself when I’m not writing regularly, and I’m worse for it; I’m pettier and less patient, my world becomes narrower and my mind less intricate. Even though I’ll need to reevaluate what exactly this letter looks like in 2026—I won’t have the time for the deep-dive, weekly Sunday essays from before, plus I’d like to devote my writing time to crafting longer pieces for publication (!!)—I still want to commit myself to this space and to filling it with words (and connecting with those of you who take the time to read them!).

What I’m thinking right now is to use this space for shorter (ever the challenge for me, the least concise girl in the world…) pieces that come out every other week. I’ve made a poll below to gauge what you all would be most interested in reading. Here’s more detail on each of the categories (there’s a word limit on polls…. Not beating in the unconcise allegations!):

• Focused book/tv/film reviews: I love spending more time with something I’ve read or watched through these meditative-like reviews, but I’m reticent to do them because reviews just aren’t as interesting if you haven’t engaged with the media or text in question. For these posts, I'd offer a broader, personal reflection on the themes from something I’ve just read or watched or listened, to (think more like my review of Lorde’s Virgin than my (loving?) takedown of Too Much).

• Explorations of ideas a la “envy”: A lot of you resonated with my essay, “Can envy can be a generative emotion?” I’m interested in writing more along these lines aka deep diving into a particular emotion, virtue, etc., placing it within cultural context, and (hopefully) inviting greater nuance around it. (Ideas for posts like this include: Is fun an underrated virtue? Is gossip good for the group? Should we be wary of wishing?)

• Travel/Austin vintage scene diaries: Another great thing about my job at Pecos Jane has been getting to work and attend so many cool events in Austin. I’m interested in documenting these and also some of my (past and upcoming) travels through more informal, “on-the-ground”-type journals.

Thanks :) Feel free to text or DM me ideas, too.

And now for my actual post of the week lol—a sort of “year in review" cause ‘tis the season for retrospection.

Year in review

The word that rang around my head all of 2024 was “expansion.”

Thanks to my dissertation completion fellowship, I had a sudden jolt of access to another way of being, one that I decided to seize by moving to Austin.

For this choice to make sense, you’d have to understand how much I had made myself into a cloister during those Boston years—how, in spite of my dear friends (and thank god for them, truly), I fought an itchy loneliness that wouldn’t go away.

I wanted to experience new sensations in my body and find out things like: what would dry heat do to my skin; would I be better at living alone at 28 than I was at 22 (almost definitely); how much would I miss the seasons; if I was given joy, stared it right in the face, would I actually grab it?

To expand is to push yourself and your reaches elsewhere, to grow, but it’s also to stretch yourself. By the end of 2024, I felt that I had challenged myself, been given the golden gifts of novelty and momentum, but had also worn myself very thin. “Expansion” erodes your boundaries and tests your limits—it forces you to reexamine how far you can go without losing your center.

All of 2025 I’ve wondered what word might crystallize my experiences as clearly as “expansion” once did. No word has drummed in my head so clearly. Flipping through the pages of my paper planner (I use the same kind every year), I’m shocked by the cumulation of lives I’ve lived. I literally feel like the lyrics of “That’s Life” by Frank Sinatra (as made famous to me by SMASH): I really have been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a queen. I’ve questioned my sense of self in my most foundational relationships, felt the stings of interpersonal disappointments, while also carving out a “me” who feels genuinely worth cherishing.

Thinking about when Rian and I attended a dance workout class in Chicago via ClassPass, learned choreo to this version of this song, only for it to be played at the most deranged bottomless brunch later with Lize and Vic (of course we jumped up to perform our new dance routine!). Literally, you can’t say the lyrics don’t HIT.

I’ve experienced all-time professional highs and startling lows. The highs (because, I have to remind myself, they’re worth naming and celebrating): I officially became a doctor of the humanities, passed my defense (with my actual dream committee) with zero revisions, and won a scholarship to participate in a writers workshop in Denver, led by Claire Dederer (whose work, especially her essay, “What do we do with the art of monstrous men?” I think about all the time); I published an article in TDR, a goal of mine since starting grad school, and also in Teen Vogue, a platform I’ve steadfastly admired since Elaine Welteroth took over as its editor-in-chief in 2016 (aka back when I was writing think pieces on Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” music video for our student fashion magazine—for the record, I stand by my praise of BadGalRiRi).

However, for most of the year, I’ve felt a bit like a liar, an “imposter” (ugh), even as I’ve tried to be transparent about the pure disorientation that is graduating with a PhD during this cultural moment. It isn’t news to anyone that’s paying attention that there is a full-on attack on critical thinking, on intellectualism and the humanities, generally—perhaps what’s worth noting here is that corporations’ hyper-investment in AI, the demolishment of identity centers at universities, and my colleagues and I’s inability to find paying jobs are all connected under this current political landscape where profit and uniformity are valued much, much more than the tender, supple practices of intellectual and creative thought. My own (quite privileged) post-grad unemployment struggle matters in the sense that it’s evidence of an overarching structural reality—one in which the years-long pursuits of art, connection, and inquiry are not only not rewarded by institutions and hiring agencies, but actively punished.

Over the past twelve months, I applied to at least one hundred jobs and weathered countless rejection emails and job-posting ghostings. This summer, I fell into the scariest state of financial uncertainty that I’ve probably ever endured. I couldn’t go on unemployment because academic fellowships don’t count towards your total income, thereby disqualifying you; I still don’t have health insurance and haven’t had dental for eight years. Truth be told, I only was able to manage through those hot months because of my familial safety net—generously, my grandpa gave me his car, meaning I could sell my old one, which I had paid off before starting grad school. I used the cash from my Chevy Cruze to make rent and afford groceries. My dad drove my grandpa’s Jeep down to me at the end of August; the night before he arrived, I laid in my bed and cried from pure exhaustion, desperation, and relief until I tired myself to sleep.

This year hasn’t coalesced into a single word, some guiding-light phrase, but rather perhaps taken the form of a provocative series of questions: the who, what, where of (Dr.?!) Jenny Henderson. Who am I if I’m not in grad school anymore? What if I can never get a job in academia—what if the very institution crumbles so that the tenure-track positions that we dreamt of evaporate? Do I need to find a new dream, and is it actually the same one it’s always been (to be a writer), albeit in changed clothes? Do I even want to be somewhere I have to fight so hard to have me? Does that go for other places (and people), too?

In 2025, I stopped wearing eyeliner everyday and let people see my unarmored face. Through my job at Pecos Jane (an absolute gift), I returned to my adolescent love of fashion, a form of self-expression that I didn’t realize I had so sorely lost to the aftermath of my abuse. Creativity through clothing—adorning myself in shimmering, bright colors when I used to pray I’d disappear into my blacks and greys—has brought me back to a girlhood I never imagined I’d regain.

I’ve nurtured friendships through long phone calls and life-affirming weekend visits. I’ve also spent much of this year learning the hard lesson that others cannot be my mirror, as much as I love them or yearn for them to be—that my perceived defects are not refracted through others’ milestones and that enmeshment does not approximate closeness. This year, I aimed not to shatter that mirror of self-conception totally, but gaze into it more clearly. That’s something I want to keep working on in 2026.

If anything, in 2025 I’ve learned how to honor myself even in circumstances where I am quite powerless. I’ve learned to hold still, and moreover to keep going, when the path is covered in knotted roots and blinding fog. I’ve built a home inside my body, which sometimes felt like a blaze, but more often felt like a hearth.

While finishing my dissertation, I felt an acute grief. I wrote on a post-it that still hangs on my desk’s bulletin board: “It’s scary to want things, but you still deserve to want them.” I wrote it in handwriting so illegible that my house guests couldn’t even ascertain that I did want things, after all. But I do, still. I’m writing it plainly here. The delicate, graceful skill is to be your own harbor in that pursuit. To unblock your throat and speak clearly; to know that daring to ask the questions, the ones that you thought might unravel you, can be a way of coming home to yourself, too. Some years are ones of naming, others are invitations to become.

Thanks for reading. See ya in the new year!

Love,

Jen

Hope you’re having great weeks!

I started working at one of my favorite places in all of Austin, Pecos Jane Vintage—the most intentional and fun vintage shop. Check out their Instagram, and come visit during the week if you’re in Austin!

Ok, on to my topic of the week, one really near and dear to my heart…

Gilmore Girls and commodification of autumn

“Edgy” is probably one of the last words you’d associate with Gilmore Girls, the beloved mother-daughter drama, where autumn is everlasting and banter runs at 2x speed.

^ Instant coziness.

And, yet, Gilmore Girls’ central duo, Lorelai and Rory—and especially, Rory’s rock-and-roll bff, Lane—demonstrate musical and cinematic tastes fundamentally incongruent with Gilmore Girls’ general reputation: Tastes that might even be described as “edgy,” or, at the very least, punk rock.

Some evidence: In one episode, Rory readily guesses which Clash song her rebellious love interest, Jess, is alluding to; when Lorelai and Rory’s small town of Stars Hollow hosts a snowman-building contest, the girls model their’s after Björk.

The Gilmore girls have little interest, and at certain points, express outright derision towards pop music and stereotypically Y2K “girly” media, generally. When Lorelai surprises Rory with a plaid skirt to announce her acceptance to Chilton, a prestigious private school, Rory responds with acrimony: “I’m gonna be in a Britney Spears video?”

Although many Gilmore Girls viewers—myself included—adore films like Bridget Jones’s Diary, Legally Blonde, and The Princess Diaries, it’s hard to imagine Lorelai and Rory throwing their iconic living-room viewing parties for films of that genre (which, tbh, speaks to some unchecked internalized misogyny in the Gilmore household). Gilmore Girls is arguably a silver-screen counterpart to these films; released at the same time, Gilmore also is driven by female independence, strong feminine aesthetics, and warm wit. While it was second-nature for my adolescent brain to idolize Lorelai, Britney, Bridget, and Carrie Bradshaw simultaneously, I doubt that coffee-guzzling, Bowie-worshipping Gilmore would herself appreciate those comparisons.

^ In Rory’s valedictorian speech, she cites lauded literary women—Jane Austen, Eudora Welty, and, for cool-girl measure, Patti Smith—as the role models her mother raised her with.

On TikTok and Instagram, I often get content that hypothesizes which TSwift era the Gilmore girls would most identify with (Lorelai is so Midnights). However, as many others have rightly pointed out, Lorelai, Rory, and Lane would not be Swifties; based on the show, they would’ve mocked all things Taylor, just as they would’ve reviled being associated with anything approaching “Christian girl autumn.”

So, how did Gilmore Girls get lumped into a pop-culture niche that its characters would have despised? Does our society simply group all commercially-driven representations of white women into one—privileged and aspirational, but also frivolous and sepia-soaked—thing?

Yes, that’s obviously a huge part of it (we can all just go home now!). The commodification of white, upper-middle class girlhood flattens and sparkles within its codified rubric of camaraderie and empowerment, one that presumes universal experience.

“Commodification” is defined as the transformation of something—like a person’s identity, or an idea, or an artwork—into an economic product. “Girlhood” is an industry, and the more its products can rely on consistent and aspirational selling points, the more effective that industry is. This is how the Gilmore girls—who are canonically not “girls’ girls” (an idea itself which is itself now commodified and is starting to drive me up a wall)—become part of a branding identity divorced from the show’s actual content.

What I want to talk about this week, however, is another, related phenomenon—one that, as a November birthday, is very near and dear to my heart. And that is the commodification of autumn itself: When did the season become a brand, as hyper-marketable as girlhood and sharing much of the same target audience?

Can we track Gilmore Girls’ commercial success alongside autumn’s? And how does this relate to girlhood’s commodification more generally?

Pumpkin Spice Lattes and Stars Hollow

Money doesn’t grow on trees—that is, unless their leaves are advertising Starbucks’s pumpkin spice lattes.

Starbucks released their now-famous pumpkin space lattes in fall of 2003. That same year, Gilmore Girls entered its third season, which is considered by many fans to be the show’s peak (and I’m not just talking foliage!).

Between 2022 and 2023 alone, the pumpkin spice market generated over $800 million dollars, according to Fortune. Today, “cozy fall core” short-form videos on TikTok and Instagram are so massively popular that they have allowed content producers to pursue autumnal influencing full-time. Caitlin Covington, also known as “Christian girl autumn,” routinely gains over 7 billion on her fall-related TikToks; after Covington travelled to Vermont for her annual fall photoshoot, the state’s small town of Pomfret became so overwhelmed that it instituted a tourist photography ban on one of its most scenic routes.

Like many digital trends, “cozy” autumnal content accelerated in fall of 2020, on the heels of cottagecore COVID summer and with many young people were stuck inside, desperate to romanticize the simple parts of their lives. At the same time, Y2K aesthetics came back in full-force. Both phenomena increased Gilmore Girls’ appeal to new, younger audiences, for whom the show still felt nostalgic, even if they’d never seen it before.

Gilmore Girls’ gauzy saturation, soft la-la-las, and early-2000s fashion all generate a supreme feeling of comfort, the televised equivalent of a well-worn down comforter and a crackling wood-wick candle. There are stakes and intergenerational power clashes in Gilmore Girls, of course, but the drama is encased in a fuzzy container, so even those “edgy” savvy-signifiers I outlined earlier don’t barb into Star Hollow’s snug bubble.

So much of the Gilmore fantasy, like the “cozy girl fall” one, is about ease. “Gilmore girls is a fantasy about living in a walkable community,” one fan memorably tweeted back in 2022. In that vein, Gilmore Girls is also very much about a fantasy of generational wealth: even though Lorelai famously flees the affluent confines of her parents’ Country-Club existence, the bulk of the show is about Rory’s reintegration into that world; and, on multiple occasions, Lorelai must trade in her single-mom freedom for her parents’ readily available, if strings-attached, resources. Even Lorelai’s Stars Hollow home—meant to be read as shabby in comparison to her parents’ Hartford estate—is quite nice; plus, Lorelai is a home-owner with a steady, rewarding career in a tight-knit, supportive community. Most of us can barely even daydream of such a lifestyle.

Autumn works as a primary setting and mise-en-scene in Gilmore Girls for many reasons: its associations with New England; its natural pairing with the show’s comforting tone; and, given the plot’s focus on Rory’s education, its back-to-school energy. The latter reason gestures to something perhaps more subtly insidious in Gilmore Girls’ romanticization; as Rory becomes more enmeshed in grandparents’ Richard and Emily’s realm of East Coast-Ivy League affluence—which has long been aesthetically rendered alongside the proverbial, brick-and-ivied autumnal campus—we, too, as viewers, risk being equally seduced by it. This, however, is where I’d argue Gilmore Girls actually excels, and why it’s so important to separate the show from its brand, which has taken on a commodified life of its own: Gilmore Girls thoughtfully interrogates that WASP-y privileged world, while not fully letting Lorelai and her selfishness off the hook, either.

One more thing I’m ruminating on re: the commodification of autumn is that fall—as in the literal season, not its mass-marketed products—is slipping away, getting briefer every year due to climate catastrophe. Could our nostalgia for a show where fall exists in perpetuity be a prescient longing for our (valid) fear that the season is fleeting, irreversibly, forever? Perhaps. All I know is that, as autumn gets shorter, my love for Gilmore Girls endures.

One Nightstand

I’m enjoying Ask Not: The Kennedys and The Women They Destroyed (thanks for the rec, Whitney!)—the pulpiest book (the Kennedys were horrible people!). I also picked up The Secret History and Cultish from my favorite local bookstore, First Light, which I’m psyched to read, although I will be doing a My Brilliant Friend reread first.

I also loved Jia Tolentino’s review / essay on Elizabeth Gilbert’s newest book (which sounds absolutely wild). Did you know Gilbert’s short story was the basis for the iconic movie, Coyote Ugly?

Ok, thanks for reading!

Love,

Jen

Hi all,

Thanks for your patience this week! I decided to abide by a Labor Day schedule and release this article tonight instead of my typical Sunday afternoon time. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming this weekend!

Last week, I wrote about envy and whether it can be a generative emotion—one that connects rather than divides. I loved hearing your all’s thoughts about envy and jealousy.

I was thinking about it again over the past week after Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement (Have you heard? Jk).

Engagements are a classic envy-inspirer and yet, I was totally, uncomplicatedly (parasocially?) happy for TnT. I think, largely, because as a longtime listener of Taylor’s (not to brag, but I viscerally remembering loving “Tim McGraw” before it even broke Country Music Television’s Top 20 countdown), I’ve heard her share so plainly her desire for—and hang-ups and heartbreaks around—romantic love.

As a critical Swiftie, there are lots of choices Taylor makes I think warrant our discernment; her openness and vulnerability about love and relationships, however, is something I’ve always admired. My feelings of joy for Taylor’s engagement—again, parasocial as they may be—prove my theory that the antidote to envy is honesty about our lives.

Ok on to the topic for this week….

Unpacking the rave renn faire aesthetic

Last month, I rocked out in Grant Park for Lollapalooza—along with seemingly every Chicago-suburban teen.

As a former Chi-town resident, I’d witnessed this late-August high school takeover countless times: Suddenly, the city’s median age drops, and its Juul pod litter count increases. The El is so crowded that every passenger, regardless of their blood alcohol level, seems to take on an inebriated sway (and this is coming from the girl who lived next to the Addison stop on Cubs home-game days!).

Something I didn’t see coming this Lolla, however, was the witchy-fairy-boho style that outfitted so many Gen-Z revelers. It seemed, for many of Lolla’s attendees—that is, those who weren’t in Olivia Rodrigo or Sabrina Carpenter cosplay—there was only one aesthetic choice, a trend I am terming: Raver Girl Renaissance Faire, or, simply, “rave renn faire.”

Over the course of Lollapalooza weekend—as Rian and Chloe can attest—I became obsessed with pointing out examples of rave renn faire. Some key elements:

· Low-rise, chunky, studded belts

· Frilly, layered skirts (ranging from mini to maxi)

· Flowy, open vests

· Lace

· Fringe

· Combat/motto boots

· “Witchy” jewelry

· Crochet and mesh tops and ponchos

· Exaggerated cowl necks

· Scarves

· Layered cross necklaces

· Metallics and hardware details

· Peasant blouses

· Corsets

^ Rave renn faire core. ALSO, important to note that renn faires, though named for the Renaissance period, famously pull most strongly from “medieval” aesthetics. These festivals’ fidelity to actual time periods is quite liberal, lol. What I’m referring to as “rave renn faire” is not strictly adherent to the actual Renaissance.

As I noted on this blog upon my return, it was like all the girlies unanimously decided to dress like Kat’s Shakespeare-loving best friend in 10 Things I Hate About You or Anne Hathaway in Ella Enchanted. The vibe pulled from music festivals’ boho traditions with a Camelot twist.

I became obsessed with tracing the roots—and possible reasons—for this trend, partially because it reminds me of the styles of my early adolescence (To think that pre-teens might be fighting over my old gauzy skirts and bedazzled peasant blouses at Delaware, Ohio’s Goodwill…). So, let’s unpack the rave renn faire aesthetic, starting with its foundations in boho chic and moving into why “medieval”-core might resonate in the contemporary era.

Bohemia’s a fallacy in your head (Yes, that’s a Rent reference <3).

Today’s “rave renn faire” style picks up where late-2000s/early-2010s festival fashion left off, harkening back to when Coachella’s boho queen, Vanessa Hudgens, ruled the Colorado Dessert in a flower crown and rotating set of culturally appropriative accessories (including: bejeweled bindis, “Native”-inspired headdresses, and “tribal” patterns… yikes).

Thankfully, our current iteration of “boho” is more culturally conscious—still, appropriation has been woven into the very fabric of “bohemian” identity since 19^th-century Paris.

The word “Bohemian” comes from the European region of “Bohemia,” which now largely consists of the Czech Republic. “Bohemian” first referred to the Romani people who, facing discrimination and persecution, migrated from South Asia to central Europe, where they were eventually granted temporary residency papers (hence, the Roma’s association with Bohemia).

Simultaneously, imperial powers—namely, Victorian-era England (… classic)—were bolstering mass consumerism and heightened labor exploitation through their technology-driven transformation of the global economy (Sound familiar?).

In Paris, a renegade flock of artists and intellectuals detested the rigid social codes, depreciation of craftmanship, and brutal inequities propagated by major colonial empires during this time period. In protest, these Parisian artists formed a new identity, one that contrasted France’s national one. They did this largely through projecting an exoticized, transient “Other” onto the Romani people, who often resided in the same low-rent neighborhoods as them.

French bohemians romanticized Romani culture, appropriating aesthetics and stereotypes associated with the group of people—namely, their sensuality, free-spiritedness, and itinerancy—and remolding them into their own distinct, iconoclastic character. Because the Romani people migrated from South Asia and through the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe, their fashion uniquely incorporated the cultures of each of these regions; when the so-called bohemians of Paris copied the Roma, they were also copying elements of South Asian, Persian, Egyptian, and Eastern European style.

When the Woodstock generation borrowed from the Bohemians of the Industrial Revolution, they didn’t just mimic their fashion patterns: 1970s hippies also, in part, solidified their style through appropriating from an exoticized Other—in this case, mainly Native Americans.

Interestingly, hippies, like Paris’s bohemians, were navigating their own deep disillusionment with national politics, particularly with the Vietnam War and draft. They longed for a communal identity defined, famously, by love, not war, and clung onto free-flowing and -thinking styles as a desperate rebuke to their mounting powerlessness.

Could something similar be happening now?

Historically, rises in boho’s ubiquity are tied to eras of serious political dissatisfaction. Late-19^th-century bohemians, 1970s hippies, and late-aughts festival-goers are united in that they were each trying to decouple themselves from militaristic national politics through exercising romantic, uninhibited aesthetic identities.

For example, while the 70s are often made synonymous with free-love and ample weed, young people’s fashion may have been its own kind of elaborate manifestation ritual for a liberation that felt very out of reach. At the end of the 1960s, MLK Jr. had been assassinated and the police had murdered other activist leaders, including, notably, Black Panthers Fred Hampton, Bobby Hutton, and Mark Clark. The draft for the Vietnam War—which many young people vehemently protested and/or were forced to serve in—was in full swing.

In the late-aughts, American youth felt powerless against the “War on Terror” and massive recession. Today, the United States is not only enabling, but accelerating, climate catastrophe and the genocide of the Palestinian people (among other things). All of these historical phenomena are, of course, specific to their own historical contexts—it’s dangerous to equate them—but, just as political strategies and patterns recycle and reinvent themselves, so, too, do aesthetic rebellions. The more change and choice feel illusive to younger generations, the more it seems they “free up” their fashion through playing out various bohemian fantasies.

Chemana Kemali, designer and newly appointed creative director of Chloé, prophesized the return of boho chic with her debut collection at Paris Fashion Week. When asked why she thought people might be compelled by boho chic today, Kemali reflected:

“I think there’s this longing for undone-ness and freedom and softness and movement, and when you look at history, it’s rooted in the ’70s, when people wanted to free themselves from conventions and traditional lifestyles and sexuality. In terms of fashion, at some point boho was overdone and overused; it was past its peak and had gotten really commercial. The industry got tired of it, and it disappeared—but it’s an interesting question, because this longing for it comes from wanting to feel that spirit once more. It’s the moment for it again: People want to be themselves, live the way they live—defining your life for yourself.”

But, in the age of hyper-astute algorithms, how much do we even really “define our lives,” or our senses of style, for that matter?

How much do we actually choose what we wear?

Recently—after almost purchasing a gingham-print bikini, mid-length dress, and set of loungewear online at midnight—I had a bit of an existential fashion crisis. Like a diver coming up for air, I looked up from my Old Navy cart, totally perplexed: much love to my gingham-wearing besties, but I think the only time I’ve been into the pattern is when I went as Dorothy for Halloween. How did it suddenly over-take my aesthetic?

The answer was clearly marked by a digital breadcrumb trail, a Hansel-and-Gretel path through my TikTok and Instagram discover pages, which all featured several gingham-centric targeted ads.

I had to wonder: Do I really like the styles I believe I do—or, at the behest of brands’ millions of digital machinations, am I simply following market trends? When it comes to fashion, are we as independently minded as we’d like to believe?

Another central part of “rave renn faire” is, of course, the medieval nature of it all. There’s already a substantive amount of overlap between bohemian and “medieval” styles, however, the latter—and what I’m calling “rave renn faire”—allows for heavier variance in gender expressions though its heightened emphasis of both classically feminine “cottagecore” elements, such as flowing skirts and fairy influences, and more masculine details, including hardware details (think, studded belts) and combat boots.

In an insightful Instagram Reel (shoutout to Cara for sending!), creator and history teacher, Lauren Cella, theorized that Gen Z’s interpretation of boho chic rebels through romanticizing the mundane: literally “touching grass” in a cultural climate governed by the digital sphere.

Maybe “rave renn faire” wearers are rehearsing choice by making going outside seem like an adventure. I get the temptation to fabricate a storybook world: one where heroes prevail; where you mount a horse, instead of unlocking a Waymo; where divination isn’t contained to TikTok tarot readers; and where cell phones and comment wars are swapped for tavern pints and joust fights.

In a recent article on Polyester, writer Donna Santucci highlighted designers of a style she locates as “anti-recession core,” which, “leans into the weird, the whimsical, and the refreshingly niche.” “As people perceive reality and the dominant culture as more and more suffocating, the desire for an opposition based in freedom and expression grows,” she offers.

That sounds like an ideal version of “rave renn faire” to me. My hope is that the younger generation can harness bohemian whimsy and medieval enchantment in a way that is genuinely authentic to them. Because, honestly? We could all use a little magic.

One Nightstand

• I’m almost done with Doppelganger, and tbh, sad to finish. I also started Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed (wild title), and it’s so pulpy, to use Whitney’s word—tonally is actually very Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo! I’m also over halfway through Demon Copperhead. Planning to reread My Brilliant Friend next (I know, shocking).

Ok thank you for reading!!

Next week, I’m planning to write about “how Gilmore Girls lost its edge.” But, since it’s officially September and back-to-school season, I’m wondering you all would be interested in a “Fall Reading Guide,” similar to the summer one I shared at the end of July. I’ll post a poll to my insta, but also feel free to text directly / lmk!

Love,

Jen

Hope you’re well—this dog-days time of year always reminds me of two of my favorite pieces of music: Lana Del Rey’s Normal Fucking Rockwell! (probably my favorite album of all time), and Phoebe Bridgers’s cover of Summer’s End (originally by John Prine).

^ There aren’t many lyrics that soothe me more than: “In your car / the windows are wide open.”

A piece of exciting news: Time Being Books, one of my favorite places in Austin (run by my amazing and generous friend, Addie Oscher!), is featuring my article, “‘In Pieces’: Nina Simone’s Critical Geographies and Listening as Incommensurable Practice,” as part of their “Research in Practice” series. “In Pieces” is an excerpt from the first chapter of my dissertation. I’m thrilled that Time Being is making it more accessible—truly a model for how resource sharing should be <3

My SubStack article for this week is a bit of a departure from my usual fare. I wanted to write about envy and whether it can possible be a generative emotions: One that unites and teaches, rather than divides and distorts. Let’s get into it.

Can envy be a generative emotion?

“Thou shalt not covet,” the Bible warns; “envy is pain at the fortune of others,” Aristotle writes.

Oh, envy. The word itself summons to mind depraved witches and petty stepsisters, desperate to thwart some maiden’s radiant destiny. As an emotion, envy is considered to be so undesirable, so gruesome, that it’s literally equated with monstrosity.

But is it possible that enviousness—in all its green-eyed grotesquerie—can be generative? Can envy ever deepen relationships instead of wedging them apart?

Emotions researcher, Brené Brown—who is best known for her viral TEDx talks on vulnerability and shame—defines envy and jealousy as two related, yet distinct, feelings. “Envy,” she shares, “occurs when we want something that another person has.” Meanwhile, “jealousy is when we fear losing a relationship or a valued part of a relationship that we already have.” You might be envious of a friend’s professional achievements, access to community, or romantic relationship, but you would be jealous of a friend spending more time with their shiny-new acquaintance. I’ll talk about both emotions in this article, but will focus more explicitly on envy.

^ One of Brown’s popular TEDx talks. Highly recommend her book and HBO series, Atlas of the Heart, where she writes about envy and other emotions!

Brown hypothesizes that, as a culture, we use the term “envious” less than “jealous” because envy is associated with hostility (“Envy”’s distinction as one of the seven deadly sins isn’t great PR, either). Although “envy” may come with a greater stigma than jealousy, both emotions are viewed as childish and unbecoming: There’s a reason that “they’re just jealous” is usually offered as a consolation to victims of school-age bullies.

I’d argue that nearly all of us are experiencing envy and jealousy far more frequently and acutely than is socially acceptable for us to articulate. In preparation for this essay, I posted a few questions about both emotions to my Instagram; the responses that I received were enthusiastic and relieved. Chatting back and forth with many of you, it became clear to me that most of us yearn to talk about envy and jealousy without shame. We want to unburden ourselves from the all-consuming comparison narratives that plague us—that are woven inside of some of our closest relationships—without our comments seeming like an attack (Even in writing this, I’ve deleted so many specific examples of envy from my own life; it feels impossible to write about surface-level envy in a way that testifies to just how layered the situation is, that does justice to all parties and factors).

Envy is also an emotion we’ve likely been on the other side of, which I’ll talk about in a bit. I hate that feeling, too, and have experienced so much guilt and sadness from it. I can’t help but wonder: Is there a way to talk about envy without it becoming an indictment or—maybe even worse—a one-way pity party?

Where does envy come from?

I have found that primal, yell-in-your-pillow sort of envy almost always boils down one of two beliefs: They don’t deserve it; or I can never have it.

Each of these stories is harmful and limiting to both parties. And sometimes the second reason—“I can never have it”—disguises itself as the first, the bite of resentment a cloak for private insecurity.

Envy is instructive, or so the therapeutic adage goes, because it reveals what we really want. But what’s the line between need and entitlement? And when you are in the plunges of precarity, how do you decipher between real and imagined lack?

When I look honestly at my catalogue of envies, it might as well be a list, pinched deep in my heart, of my greatest insecurities. Although “green-eyed,” as in envious, and being “green,” as in inexperienced, derive from different contexts, their shared verdigris gestures to both states’ sensitive nature. To be envious is to be made vulnerable—to admit to an aspect of your inner world that is as delicate and tepid as a fledgling sprout. No wonder we’re so quick to cover our envies with scorn: We’re protecting the frailest sides of ourselves!

In popular culture, we don’t have many models for healthy expressions of envy. Fairy tales are laden with wicked allegories of envy and its consequences: Most obviously, The Evil Queen desires Snow White’s youthful beauty so much that she plots to murder her. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, the Queen obsessively chants, Who’s the fairest of them all? When the magic mirror spites its proprietor’s vanity and selects her stepdaughter as the kingdom’s fairest, the Queen is driven mad with envy. She sends her huntsman to kill Snow White and, as proof of his conquest, bring back her human heart, encased in a bejeweled box.

^ Poster child for envy.

In the original Brothers Grimm story, the Queen orders the huntsman to return with not Snow White’s heart, but her lungs and liver. Why? Because the Queen plans to have the princess’s organs boiled and salted, so that she can eat them.

As cannibalistic as this depraved little detail is (wonder why they omitted it from the Disney version!!), I find that it encapsulates the grittiness—the visceral, blood-and-guts quality—of true envy better than the Evil Queen’s impervious gazing into her magical mirror does. Like all of our grandest emotions—the ones that are so all-consuming they have entire literary genres and branches of Freudian psychology devoted to exploring them—envy is not logical. It is embodied; it cuts deep. There’s a reason why, when Olivia Rodrigo snarl-sings “All I see is what I should be / Prettier / happier / jealousy / jealousy,” every note sounds like an ax-sharpened dagger.

^ Honestly a good model for expressing jealousy with nuance.

Antidotes for envy, and moving beyond the “they’re just jealous” story

As unpleasant as envy feels, being on its receiving end is also pretty freaking awful. You wonder: Has this person been secretly filing evidence against me this whole time? If they really loved me, wouldn’t they be happy for me? And, above all: If they really understood me, wouldn’t they get that whatever thing they envy—the relationship, the career milestone, etc.—didn’t come to me easily: that I’m negotiating its compromises and complications, that I’m dying to talk about the hard parts of good things, too?

When we succumb to envy’s allure, we slot ourselves and others into narrow tropes. We refuse to see the entire story.

In the example of the Evil Queen, imagine if, instead of exiling her, Snow White’s stepmother took the time to get to know and actually speak to her stepdaughter—to see a person instead of a competition. The Queen was so committed to the story that most fed her self-righteous insecurities that she rejected her stepdaughter’s very humanity.

This need for complexity—for engaging in the fullness of people’s lives—is present for the “envied” person, as well. This is why a part of me has always been wary of, even as I’ve been (vainly) flattered by, the whole “they’re just jealous” rhetoric. Casting the person who envies you as simply bitter, or petty, or even pitiable misses the valid, deep-seated feelings behind their envy—feelings that likely have very little to do with you at all.

Sometimes envy is spurred by very real structural privileges, material disadvantages, and aspects of life that are as immutable as they are unfair. In those cases, how can a discussion of envy become a productive analysis of its particular contexts and impacts? In her book, Ugly Feelings, scholar Sianne Ngai argues that envy can actually be “a recognition of social and economic inequalities,” hence “our culture’s tendency is to stereotypically dismiss envy as a merely ‘feminine’ affect” and, therefore, as “trivial.” Envy can be a powerful mirror to and critique of access to power, privilege, and influence—no wonder its discredited and most associated with vain queens.

In the other scenario, in which the envious person believes that they can’t ever get the great job, partner, routine etc., how can you—as someone close to them—emphasize that they are worthy of those things? How might you dispel their envy-frenzied notion that having that one thing automatically expunges your other issues?

Envy, if both parties can get past their own guarded-ness, can be a space for joining, for expressing profound frustration, grief, want, or fear to someone you trust. You’re also not alone in the things you envy: After posting my prompts about envy and jealousy the other day (answers pictured below), I was stunned to realize that so many of the people I envy, or otherwise imagine as “ahead” of me in life, experience the exact same insecurities that I do.

So, here’s my proposition, to all of us, as we wade the waters of that green-eyed emotion we’re supposed to never feel: Let’s be more honest about not just our envies and where they come from, but the nuances of our lives. When we genuinely listen to and openly share those intricacies—and create space for pain, sweetness, difficulty, and difference within our experiences—it’s easier to turn the dial down on resentment and up on connection. Better yet, we might start to believe that many of the things we want, that our envy hungers for in its raw and keen way, we deserve to have—if only we can bravely speak them.

One Nightstand

• I’m getting deeper in Demon Copperhead (it’s 550 pages!) and really starting to get immersed in Demon’s world. I’m also pretty excited about my TBR (I had some great scores at Half Price Books and a solid library haul recently). I’m planning to read Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation next. Has anyone else read it?

Ok gotta run to yoga! Thanks for reading <3

Love,

Jen

Hi everyone,

Hope you’re doing well and having lovely Sundays! Sorry for the delayed timing of this article—this girl hit snooze a few too many times before 11am yoga (aka during the precise time I typically finish editing).

Several of you expressed interest in reading a review of Too Much, Lena Dunham’s new series on Netflix starring Meg Stalter and Will Sharpe. I have to be honest and say, although I’ve made it through eight episodes, I still haven’t managed the series and idk if I will! As you’ll read below, I don’t… love it! In fact, you might even say, I think it’s…. too much.

Let’s dive right in.

Simply “Too Much”

Have you ever had the experience where, in the midst of telling a story, you sense the other person not listening and, so, in your desperation, you ratchet up the details of your tale, blurting out its most salacious and headline-worthy bits? Your story is still true, of course, but you’ve added revealing details you’d otherwise omit to re-grab your audience’s attention.

This phenomenon summarizes how I’ve felt watching Too Much on Netflix—except, in this case, I’m on the receiving end.

The series—which was co-created by Lena Dunham and her husband, Luis Felber, and stars fellow Ohio queen Meg Stalter (of Hacks and TikTok fame)—is replete with drama, candor, and charm. However, its structure is so disorganized that my viewing experience has been more akin to being trapped inside a cocktail-hour convo with a chaotic coworker than enjoying the streaming era’s latest fizzy, well-made binge.

More often than not, I’ve found, this classic “disinterested-listener-desperate-storyteller” debacle arises—whether on screen or irl—when the speaker has haphazardly constructed their tale. The key players are poorly drawn. The stakes and setting are unclear. The tangents are plentiful, and the context inappropriate. The story—ultimately—makes very little sense. And, so, the teller anxiously throws whatever they can at the wall, hoping something sticks to their audience and yarns them back in.

Too Much’s protagonist, Stalter’s Jessica, often finds herself in like these, whether at professional dinner parties and or while meeting the posh friends of her love interest, Felix (played by Will Sharpe). Unfortunately, the structure of Too Much echoes Jessica’s disorder: while I statistically love a messy main character—especially if it’s a creatively deft, but interpersonally disastrous woman—I find it crucial that, no matter how chaotic our heroine, her story is still shaped in a way that satisfies and surprises. On Too Much, tuning into Jessica’s misadventures was more of a chore than a provocative delight.

“Girls Gone Bad:” How did we get Too Much?

(Shoutout to The Guardian for this subtitle!)

I was thrilled when Too Much was first announced: I earnestly watched all of Girls, for which Too Much’s creator, Lena Dunham is most well-known, as it came out. Hannah Horvath and her cohort’s coming-of-age was timed alongside my own undergraduate education: The Girls series finale aired—no joke—the literal week I graduated college. I remember the cries of Hannah Horvath’s newborn baby cutting through my Four Loko-induced hangover as I streamed the finale atop my bedframe-less mattress. Rian, was, per usual, crashing at me and Brenton’s apartment and recovering next to me; she’d never seen Girls, had absolutely zero clue what was going on, and iconically remarked, “Wait if it’s called Girls, why does she have a baby?”

Now, almost ten years later (SOS), Brenton and Rian are both huge fans of the series (“It really helps me understand certain types of female friendships,” says Brenty, a true Marnie). Since Girls went off the air, the series has risen in both critical and public favor, thanks in part to an excellent, viral Girls rewatch podcast hosted by Amelia Ritthaler and Evan Lazarus. The general discourse Girls has shifted to understand Dunham as intentionally critiquing Horvath and her peers, rather than simply “playing herself.” As Horvath and Dunham have become less synonymous, we, as viewers, have been able to have more interesting and nuanced conversations about the show’s acute depiction of a particular brand of white, liberal-arts-grad, millennial privilege, as well as its merits as just really fantastic, well-written television. As Adrian Horton remarks in her insightful review of Too Much:

“Though a cultural lightning rod when it aired from 2012 until 2017 – its whiteness, convincing narcissism, frank sexuality and frequent nudity all catnip for the cresting blogosphere and cyclical moral panic – Girls has rightfully settled into its status as one of the best television series of the 21st century, a foundational text for millennials as well as a biting satire of solipsistic, Obama-era striving… The show was always sharper than tendentious criticism acknowledged, a knowing send-up not to be taken too seriously, though it did seriously shape the TV that followed … Though television has explored sex much more successfully than movies in the years since, no show has fully succeeded Girls’ unvarnished vision of sex as something both banal and essential. No wonder so many people are rewatching it.”

Here, Horton nails one of the things that made Girls so successful: Its perfect blend of taking its characters’ desires, dreams, and devastations seriously, while also not being afraid to hold a mirror up to their most unbecoming and cringe-inducing qualities. I had hopes Too Much might strike the same balance, one that is especially hard to achieve in romantic comedies. Sadly, if there’s one word I’d use to describe Too Much it’s unbalanced.

Some framing questions

Let’s return to Too Much and my concerns re: its storytelling structure.

In my Public Speaking and Storytelling classes, I always tell my students that great stories give us everything we need to know, but don’t give everything away, at the very beginning: The opening scene is our story’s blueprint, and it must hold one of the most important aspects of any tale inside of it—clarity on why it’s being told.

^ These are the videos I show in my classes lol.

In these classes, I often use Pixar as an example: Finding Nemo opens with Marlin losing his entire family except for Nemo, thus clarifying his stakes and letting us know the movie will concern the balance between protection and trust in parental love.

More related to Too Much, Girls brilliantly opens with Hannah at dinner with her parents, who are visiting her in NYC from Michigan. Her parents reveal that they are cutting Hannah off; she’s been living off their income for two years post-grad, and they no longer want to “bankroll her groovy lifestyle.”

^ Girls great first scene.

This scene perfectly sets up Girls’ main tension: The coddled lives of its twenty-something characters—who are, definitionally, childish (girls, but not quite women)—and their aspirations of “becoming who they truly are,” through the art, wisdom, and adventure that their city promises.

Crucially, Girls has no framing device in the form of a voiceover narrator. This provides Dunham and her creative team with the license to explore the inner lives of characters outside of Horvath, resulting in some of the series best episodes (hello, “Panic at Central Park”). It also means that, as an audience, we aren’t expressly viewing the show’s events from Hannah’s eyes, the way we watch Sex and the City from Carrie’s perspective; as such, we’re able to be more critical of her—our experience of the show doesn’t rely on our intimacy with its protagonist.

Too Much attempts a voice-over structure more like Fleabag or Sex and the City, and this is its primary downfall. In the pilot episode of Too Much, we, as the audience, are presented with several different conceits, or reasons the story is being told. Through Jessica’s narration in the pilot, we’re clued into Too Much being one of the following types of stories:

1. An American Girl in England: These “fish-out-of-water”-types of plots are broadly invested in tracking cultural differences, but—character-wise—are chiefly concerned with their character’s transformation. The protagonist must blend disparate versions of themselves as they “become” who they’re meant to be by the story’s conclusion.

   Many commoner-to-royal tales are this. Think: The Princess Diaries, My Fair Lady, and What a Girl Wants. In Too Much, Jessica bumbles her way through London and clashes against its various cultures as she realizes Princess Diana’s city is not the Notting Hill of her dreams. Her opening voiceover announces her arrival and immersion into London as one central frame we’re meant to understand her journey through. This version of the show relies most heavily on Jessica’s workplace antics; her ultra-posh, British colleagues are given plenty of zingers, but very little substance—or, really, I was so overwhelmed by everything else happening I could barely pay attention to what was going on with them. Jessica is repeatedly contrasted against the “English-ness” of her surroundings, so much that her journey across the pond seems to be the show’s central thrust. And yet, it’s kinda not, and it’s unclear what her “transformation”—and its dependence on her new setting—is meant to be.

2. The Rom-Com Remix: Related to the first conceit, Too Much’s pilot references several rom-com and period romance tropes—both explicitly, in the case of its British allusions, and more implicitly (The post-break-up-move/new-job/do-over is standard rom-com fare).
   

   As Jessica fantasizes that Sharpe’s Felix is her Mr. Darcy, we’re thrown immediately into their courtship before their chemistry barely has a chance to sizzle and ignite (Literally: The pilot also notably features Jessica catching herself on fire).

   During Too Much’s pilot, I wondered: Will the show follow in the footsteps of (the absolutely genius) Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, lampshading and weaving in romantic-comedy clichés in order to critique and deconstruct them?

   Too Much tries to document two oddballs falling for one another despite all of their baggage, but we never really get a chance to settle into their relationship—or either character, for that matter—before we’re expected to be fully invested in their love story. There’s too much self-awareness for Too Much to be a true, formulaic rom-com, and not enough for it to be a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend-style deconstruction.

3. “An intergenerational Grey Gardens hell of single women and one hairless dog:” In the pilot—and, also, throughout Too Much’s uneven ten-episode run—we also get extended scenes at Jess’s Long Island home, where her sister (Lena Dunham), mother (Rita Wilson), and grandmother (Rhea Perlman). In scenes that feel “quite like a play,” to quote my favorite podcasters, this matrilineal cadre lounges about their antique-y living room, commiserating and quick-firing clever dialogue at one another.

   

   Later in the show, we continue to drop into Jessica’s familial estate, via ample mother-daughter FaceTime and even when our protagonist is not there (though she’s also supposedly the show’s narrator?). Dunham, Wilson, and Perlman are all captivating on-screen and yet their presences are confounding: If we’re following Jessica’s romance with/in London, why do we keep circling back Long Island without her?

4. The Wendy Jones of It All: Jessica begins her voice-over address to Wendy Jones (Emily Ratjkowski), the gorgeous, lizard-rescuing influencer that her ex, Zev, played by Michael Zegen, has left her for. We quickly find out that Jessica broke into Wendy and her ex’s shared home wielding a garden gnome and that Jessica, now obsessed with Wendy, has a secret Instagram account that consists entirely of bizarre videos addressed to ex’s new fiancée.

   

5. The Post-Breakup Flashback Reel: Speaking of Zev, who has already elicited comparisons to Dunham’s ex, Jack Antonoff, we are treated to several, lengthy flashbacks of their relationship. Zev’s gradual, withholding cruelty is emotionally impactful—and helps us understand Jessica’s simultaneous craving and anxiety around real, steady affection—but it’s, again, unclear what vantage point we’re viewing their retrospective from. Is Jessica still narrating to Wendy Jones? Why is one episode seemingly framed with Zev, alone, lamenting his mommy issues and resentment of Jessica to an anonymous therapist?

Of course, successful stories can draw from many different tropes or structures. I’m not saying Too Much has to be just one of the above things—but I am saying its lack of clarity about why Jessica is narrating in the first place, why her voiceovers frequently disappear entirely, and through what framework we’re supposed to be receiving her story is destabilizing and, ultimately, disconnected me from the show, despite its compelling qualities.

As one astute critic, Lili Loofbourow, noted, Dunham is “an excellent miniaturist”—her work shines when it dares to linger in split-second glances, extended afternoons, and claustrophobic dynamics. Maybe an incisive miniaturist taking on “too much” is doomed to falter.

Circling back to the disinterested-listener-desperate-storyteller I began with, Too Much reminded me of another place I’ve watched this dynamic unfold: The pages of the personal essay.

I’ve often found, in writing workshops and in my own work, one of the hardest parts about writing about your own life is choosing what to edit out. Of course, we want to document every complex detail of our lives and their characters; to not do so often feels like a betrayal of our stories and the people we love that are inside of them. But, nearly always, your reader doesn’t need to know the entire backdrop of your relationship with your best friend to comprehend the moment in time you’re narrating; they don’t need to know everything that was going on in your life to join you in your 12-page revelation.

In the case of Too Much, as Dunham herself has noted, the story is largely autobiographic. Dunham moved to England after her devastating break-up with Zev’s real-life doppelganger, Antonoff; her and Jessica bear several similarities, and Dunham, as mentioned before, even plays her protagonist’s sister.

Part of me wonders if Too Much is a typical case of a storyteller being not quite ready to mold their inspiration into its most shapely structure because it’s too close to home. I get it: When my audience seems to not fathom the totality of my story, I, too, am tempted to give them “too much,” and—damningly—not quite enough.

I’m ultimately still reading all the same things as last week, so nothing new on that front!

Also, as research for this week, I read Lena Dunham’s “Goodbye to NYC” essay, which I enjoyed. My other hyperfixation of the week has been Taylor’s podcast interview with Travis and his brother, Jason Kelce (who is kinda giving Barbara Walters, in a good way)—it low key made me believe in love again lmao!

Have great weeks!

Love,

Jen

Hope you’re all doing well!

Last weekend, I was at Lolla (more to report soon on festival culture!). This weekend, my Dad is visiting = score! As I’m writing this, we’re getting ready to head to Barton Springs. I’m so pumped!

Now that we’re officially into August, it’s time to really ruminate on songs of the summer—or the lake thereof. So let’s get into it:

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What even is “the song of the summer” and should we be worried that we don’t have one?

The summer between fourth and fifth grade is a transitional time for most, but it especially was for me: I was switching schools, and I’d skipped a grade (ok, flex…).

My old school was the kind where we got a week off for the county fair, one of my most beloved childhood traditions; my new school was private, filled with secret codes and swaths of plaid I didn’t yet understand. The girls in my class seemed to live in a world of Vera Bradley and Gwen Stefani. I was eager—and anxious—to fit in.

And so, one afternoon in the hockey rink parking lot, I turned the dial on the family van’s radio from 92.3 WCOL, Columbus’s #1 Country Radio, to WNCI 97.9, thrusting myself into the thrilling realm of Top 40. I was in luck: The song of the summer that year—2005, in hindsight, one of the greats—was Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together.”

^ “We Belong Together” was also, concerningly, my top song of 2016. And, as Brenton can attest, I was addicted to randomly—and inappropriately!—putting it on aux at every party, even when it was simply not the vibe. I guess I was going thru it in a way ’05 Jen could never have seen coming!

By the start of the fall semester—and middle-school—I knew all the summer of ‘05’s greatest hits: “Pon de Replay,” “Hollaback Girl,” etc. (It really was a great summer for music). Although my new classmates and I didn’t necessarily have the same summers, we had listened to the same music: That shared vocabulary—our Top 40 alphabet—eased me into a new era, one that otherwise felt as uncomfortable as my sunburnt skin, raw, against the rough edge of my summer denim.

What even is a song of the summer? Some Theories

What even is a so-called “song of the summer”? In their round-up of every “song of the summer” from 1962-2022, NPR describes the phenomenon in terms that are downright pandemic:

People have funny ways of describing hit pop songs. A song is ‘infectious,’ an ‘earworm.’ It ‘gets under your skin.’ It’s not summer without little annoyances — sunburn, mosquito bites, sweat — just as it’s not summer without the Song of the Summer. We’re talking about a song (or two, or three) that explodes and quickly permeates pop culture. It runs rampant up and down your radio dial, around your parties and deep in your brain. Perhaps this is why such pop music is described in terms usually reserved for the plague.

Here, NPR’s Eleanor Kagan equates summer pop hits with pervasive irritations. Her wording brings to mind the concept of “pet peeves”—nuisances so idiosyncratic that they nearly become cherished.

This irritated, then acquiescent, disposition has certainly characterized my relationship to some past songs of the summer: the ubiquity of Walk the Moon’s “Shut Up and Dance” and Dua Lipa’s “New Rules,” in particular, threatened to unhinge my tenuous grasp to sanity until, suddenly, I gave in and was dancing with rest of the crowd.

^ TBT.

Kagan’s correlation between songs of the summer and inescapability offers one possible explanation for our lack of ’25’s seasonal anthem: Although, in the era of TikTok edits and dances, we’re certainly not short on earworms, these songs fade from memory swiftly.

Just two weeks ago, on my daily 10-minute drives to my yoga studio, I was addicted to listening to CMAT’s “Take A Sexy Picture of Me;” before that it was Lola Young’s “Messy,” and before that it was Lizzy McAlpine’s “Spring into Summer,” and before that it was Hozer’s cover of the Arctic Monkey’s “Do I Wanna Know?” (hottest song of all time, maybe—either version).

^ So important.

Maybe, like so many, I’ve developed a candle-in-the-wind’s musical attention span. Except, I noticed, there was a common trend in my hyper-fixations (besides the songs’ virality): I was jamming out solely for certain segments—the ones that social media users choreographed their dances to or that soundtracked the endless stream of Gilmore Girls edits on my For You Page (Jess & Rory 4ever).

This was different than how I used to listen to my obsessions-of-the-moment. Yes, I looped songs until they made me sick since those girlhood radio days. I remember being so captivated by “Like We Never Loved At All” by Tim McGraw and Faith Hill and “Teardrops on My Guitar” by TSwift that, in the absence of stereo play, I quite literally rehearsed the lyrics and melody in my head. And, of course, I’ve fallen hard for hooks or songs’ mini-moments before—that’s literally what catchiness is.

^ The aesthetic and DRAMA of this music video irreparably shaped my young psyche.

However, since that fateful midnight in 2020 when I downloaded the TikTok app, my playlist has been defined, in part, by songs’ specific kernels of virality. It’s the segments I crave, not the entire track. And that’s made it a lot easier for me to quickly discard them—there’s always a new snippet circulating its way to my earbuds.

This may partially explain why we don’t have a song of the summer: While songs get in our ears via social media, ads, and dance tracks, they don’t linger how they used to. For something to be a “song of the summer,” you have to sit in the full freakin’ thing.

Another theory, as NPR outlines, is simply the album roll-out schedule of most major artists: Last year, spring was dominated by chart-topping, zeitgeist-consuming projects from 2024’s Cowboy Carter and Tortured Poets Department (and, to a lesser context, although not for me, eternal sunshine). This year, we had Addison (my AOTY, duh) and Mayhem.

Artists who release their albums in the spring often have a better chance at securing Grammy nominations—they’re able to build momentum over the course of the year into awards season. Perhaps, more significantly, spring albums set the stage for summer tours. After 2023’s blockbuster Eras and Renaissance tours, it makes sense that major artists would try to repeat Taylor and Beyoncé’s ticket-sales magic by releasing albums months ahead of their tours so fans can learn their new songs and get excited for their concerts. Other artists—including Sabrina Carpenter and Drake—have elected to wait until the summer’s over to release their projects.

Still, there’s another theory as to why we don’t have a song of the summer, one tentatively put forward by CNN: Our nation is fractured and the things that used to unite us—songs of the summer, sporting events, national holidays—are more fraught than they used to be. While there’s truth to this, haven’t we had some of our best songs of the summer in years characterized heavily by their divisiveness (looking at you, 2016 and 2020)?

Recently, I saw a tweet that “we don’t get a song of the summer because we’ve been bad.” I feel that or, rather, I feel that this summer has hit… differently. Personally, with the pressures (and absolute bleak reality) of the academic job market, I haven’t been able to cast off my stress and surrender to splashy fun the way I long to. These past few months, I’ve found myself in the middle of classic summer activities I should enjoy—reading by the pool, going on vacation, practicing outdoor yoga, hitting up AC-blasted bars etc.—and realized I am, inappropriately, on the verge of tears. It’s a lot harder to surrender to the 2 min. 45 seconds of a perfect summer track when, in the back of your head, you’re calculating your debts, fretting about job applications, and absorbing the depths of your futility when it comes to global and national political violence (… SOS). In the similarly “divisive” years of 2016 and 2020, it felt, at least to me, that I had somewhere to place my frustration and malaise. Now I just feel… lost.

Not to project my own woes, but it seems that it’s not just me who’s struggling to rally a sense of presence and perspective these days. This summer, I’ve found myself most able to just be in these quiet moments at my laptop, as I string my thoughts together and sit with myself—my ideas, questions, vexations, and, yes, my music. When I write, I put a record on, using each side as a timekeeper.

During the most intense crunch of completing my dissertation, my friend Harry offered some advice—to create a visual connected to writing, one that soothed and motivated me. I considered writing a salve, pictured it an antidote for the rugburn-red pain I felt in my heart. Writing became my aloe vera, or prescription-strength hydrocortisone: I smoothed it across the irritation and fear I felt internally and, as I typed letters into my screen, felt my anguish fade.

I’ve returned to this image plenty since I invented it with Harry. Of course, a “song of the summer” does not typically possess the same potent healing properties I imagine when I listened to Lana, Bon Iver, Beyoncé, Joni, and my other most favorite artists while finishing my dissertation. But, in my life, songs of the summer have offered the real promise, or perhaps meaningful illusion, of unity, whimsy, catharsis, and bravado.

Songs—whether they are nuisance-like earworms or the deep cuts dearest to our souls—are avenues into particular feelings. We owe it to music to listen to it all the way: Not just for a “snippet,” or “song of the summer” award sticker.

Each summer has a story—a swath, or an arc, that comes to define it. I catalogue my summers by their themes and backdrops. Ever the narrative-driven creature, I often even distill my summers’ lessons into singular instances: the sudden loss in August that jolted everything back into clarity; the hook-up that closed an era; the move-in-day rainstorm that signaled gritty responsibility to come.

Locating the songs that fill each particular summers’ air aids me in tapping into its sensations—how that year felt—but also its story. But, as of writing this, I wonder: In crystalizing each of my summers into a story, am I not doing something similar to what TikTok does to its viral hits—reducing a whole thing into its kernel-iest part?

I have another memory of my song-of-the-summer education, one that bookends and, in some ways, contrasts my earnest ’05 courtship with Top 40 radio.

When I first got my driver’s license, I used to be obsessed with driving to the public library and checking out stacks of CDs. I’d flip through the titles in the digital section of my local branch, searching for names that sounded familiar or that I understood, distantly, were important to my sonic studentship: Fiona Apple, the Beatles, Nina Simone, Patsy Cline, Simon & Garfunkel, and so on.

I would burn the CDs onto my laptop at home and transfer them to blank discs before returning the albums. The process was often painstaking—and a lot of times I didn’t love the albums once I downloaded them, or really only would listen to them for one song. But still, they formed a soundtrack, an archive that I associate forever with that time, that listless summer of sixteen, when I drove around for hours between my parents’ houses, my summer jobs, thrift-shops, and the library, listening to song after song, artist after artist.

At its best, a song-of-the-summer is less a pest and more a companion, one you can picture in your passenger seat. Thankfully, we’re never short on those: if you need company, all you have to do is turn up the volume and listen.

One Nightstand

• I’m still immersed in Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger—it’s truly been one of my favorite reads of the year so far. Will share more when I’m done!

Thank you all for reading! I’m planning to finally finish watching Too Much and review it for next week’s newsletter.

Love,

Jen

Reporting LIVE from Lollapalooza! It’s always so special being back in Chicago (I feel it…. another version of me…..), where I know exactly which trains to take and bars to dip into. Retracing the familiar haunts gives me perspective and some compassion for my freshly post-grad, in-tumult 2017-2019 self. And also makes me remember the adventures and textures of those days more clearly.

Also, re: Lollapalooza, I must speak on every single girly being dressed like she’s going to a rave renaissance fair: Like I’m talk chunky oval leather belts fit for horseback riding, leather ankle boots, long cotton skirts, and witchy corsets / lace tees. It’s like everyone unanimously decided to picture Kat’s best friend from 10 Things I Hate About You (pictured above) or Anne Hathaway in Ella Enchanted. I don’t hate it (at all!), but fashion anthropologists, what do you we think is going on here?? Text me lol.

^ Festival fashion inspo!!!!!

So, for this week, I was planning to write about why we don’t have a song of the summer—which I still am! Next week, a draft is all ready!—but I also felt the need to report on Sydney Sweeney’s highly concerning American Eagle ad, which uses straight-up eugenics rhetoric. While there have been some amazing overviews of the controversy online, outside of some lengthy TikToks, I haven’t really seen anyone break down the history of eugenics in the U.S. (which extends well before WWII), its anti-immigrant stance, and how the movement’s ideologies show up clearly in Sweeney’s ad. So let’s get into it—and special shoutout to my girls Mia and Maddie for their help on this article!!

Yes, Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad really is that bad

Can you spot what’s wrong with this sentence? Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.

Hint: It’s personal.

Last Wednesday, American Eagle launched their now-infamous jeans campaign with Emmy Award-nominated actress Sydney Sweeney. In one viral ad, Sweeney recites the above sentence while suggestively zipping her jeans. The camera grazes across Sweeney’s reclined body as she arches her back. At the end of the commercial, a deep, male voice declares: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” Or is it, “great genes”?

^ You can watch the campaign’s full set of ads here.

Though the brand has described Sweeney’s ads as a “cheeky” play on the conventionally beautiful actress’s good “genes,” viewers immediately raised concerns. As of now, neither Sweeney or American Eagle have responded to the controversy.

“A blonde haired, blue-eyed white woman is talking about her good genes, like, that is Nazi propaganda,” TikTok creator @midwesterngothic stated in a video that now has X views. A user on X wrote: “Maybe I'm too f***ing woke. But getting a blue-eyed, blonde, white woman and focusing your campaign around her having perfect genetics feels weird.”

Both of these critiques touch on the same troubling question: Is American Eagle promoting eugenics?

What is eugenics and what does it have to do with Sydney Sweeney’s choice in denim?

Eugenics is the pseudoscientific belief that the human race can be improved by strategically breeding more children with “superior” genetic traits. It is rooted in the fallacy that race is biological.

For eugenicists, “good genes” are almost always associated with whiteness, thinness, and able-bodied-ness. Sweeney’s blue eyes, blonde hair, light skin, and fit figure are a perfect match.

American Eagle’s celebration of Sweeney’s “good genes/jeans” is more than a poorly thought-out pun. Whether intentional or not, by designating Sweeney the literal model of “great genes,” the brand reinforces eugenicists’ narrow conceptions of a human ideal. Plus, the campaign’s use of classic Americana imagery—from its iconic blue jeans to a Ford Mustang—invokes a eugenicist fantasy of nationhood.

^ Only a matter of time before Sweeney recreates this ad.

Let’s return to the quote that opens Sweeney’s ad and this article, which indicates that genes “determine personality.” This suggestion, coupled with American Eagle’s glorification of Sweeney’s physical traits, implies that there are “good” traits and “bad” ones and that more “personality”-based attributes, like intelligence, are biological.

The idea that “better” genes can be linked to physical characteristics—like skin, hair, and eye color—is the foundation of the eugenics movement’s white supremacy. It’s also been used to justify anti-immigration policy. Though this harmful ideology is most associated with Adolf Hitler and Nazism, eugenics predates World War II and has deep roots in American culture.

Staking a claim in “Americana:” The eugenics movement in the U.S.

The concept of eugenics was born in1883 when Englishman Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, coined it to denote “the ‘science’ of improving human stock.” Galton’s theories classified humans into racist hierarchies, or ranked them according to “better” physical traits.

In 1900, a group of American scientists adopted the term and, led by Charles Davenport, advanced its policy of selective breeding as a way to eradicate “social ills,” including “promiscuity,” and “unfit” traits, such as deafness.

As my friend and colleague (and Active Listener reader!), Dr. Mia Levenson, explores in her scholarship, eugenicists performed their ideas about what science—and America—should look like in all sorts of everyday settings.

At fairs in particular, they organized “fitter family” and “better baby” contests, in which parents and their infants were judged for their overall “health” and genetic desirability. Judges evaluated contestants’ family histories, inspecting their genealogies for “weak spots.” They required contending families to take physical, mental, and sometimes even dental exams. Placed alongside livestock competitions and carnival games, these events normalized eugenics’ harmful, white supremacist beliefs within a setting of American leisure.

Sweeney’s American Eagle campaign does the same thing. It takes a classic American symbol—blue jeans—and conflates it with her “good” genes, tapping into eugenicists’ belief that increasing “good” traits in the U.S.’s population will lead to the nation’s brighter future.

Proponents of that vision of America are profoundly invested in the control of land and reproductive bodies. Early 20^th century eugenicists fretted over their nation’s fate by arguing that immigrants—from Eastern and Southern Europe, East Asia, and Latin America, especially—would pollute America’s gene pool and drain taxpayers’ resources (Sound familiar?).

The conflation between emblems of Americana and Sweeney’s DNA is driven home in another short, less-circulated ad from the campaign. Sweeney, a skilled mechanic, bends over the open hood of a vintage-styled Ford Mustang before speed-driving it off set. Again, the camera emphasizes her genetic assets—Sweeney’s cleavage and rear—as an omniscient voice repeats the campaign tagline (“Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans”).

Cars, especially U.S.-manufactured Fords, are widely regarded as a symbol for rugged American individualism. Again, American Eagle (the brand’s name itself being another major national symbol) couples Sweeney’s white, blonde-haired, and blue-eyed body with images that scream “Americana.” In doing so, they present a portrait of a nation— many white supremacists’.

Why it matters that Sweeney is, to quote Newsweek’s critique, a “conservative hot girl”

Sweeney’s American Eagle campaign isn’t the first time the actress has been accused of pandering to the conservative, largely white and male, side of her fanbase.

When Sweeney collaborated with men’s care brand Dr. Squatch to sell a limited-edition soap that contained traces of her bathwater, she capitalized on her own objectification (and to great success: Sweeney’s soap, which was originally $8, resold at $2,000).

Sweeney’s ability to profit off of her sexualization reflects less on her business-savvy and more so underscores the fact that dominant U.S. culture prizes—and financially rewards—white, blonde, conventionally attractive women.

Through these ads, Sweeney may be trying to reclaim her body’s objectification. In the case of American Eagle’s campaign, however, aligning her desirability with eugenicist principles isn’t an example of female empowerment.

Additionally, obsessing over Sweeney’s motives detracts from where our critical focus should lie: The corporations who are perfectly fine to sell eugenicist propaganda so long as it generates revenue.

^ Brooke Shields’s 1980 ad campaign.

Defenders of Sweeney’s jeans ad have also likened it to Brooke Shields’s Calvin Klein campaign of the 1980s. In those ads, in which Shields also muses on “genes/jeans” while getting dressed, the supermodel was 15. In recent years, she’s reflected that the commercials sexualized her without her knowledge.

But Sweeney, meanwhile, is a 27-year-old woman who has repeatedly accentuated her body’s sex appeal for her commercial gain. When companies and consumers celebrate that they aren’t simply “letting Sweeney enjoy her hotness,” as so many YouTube commenters have intimated—they’re participating in an argument about what bodies are and are not virtuous in mainstream American society.

Wait, aren’t Sweeney’s jeans supporting survivors of domestic violence?

Yes, and to be honest, that makes the eugenicist tone of the campaign even worse.

The elevation of white women’s “good genes” is a slippery slope to implying that some domestic abuse survivors are more deserving of justice than others. Eugenicists often relied on their criminalization of Black men and women to suggest white people’s—and especially white women’s—moral superiority and purity.

Even though Sweeney’s ad campaign never directly addresses its domestic abuse hotline cause—an omission that is also worthy of our scrutiny—even subtly linking the concepts of better genes and support for abuse survivors is historically fraught.

Great jeans, actually

If American Eagle truly wanted to show off their great jeans—which, now regrettably, have been my go-to since middle school—they would have done so by featuring a wide range of models.

The idea of “perfection” should be contained to our clothing’s fit—and kept far away from our understandings of “genetics.”

Thanks for reading! Excited to recap Lolla and share my thoughts on the song of the summer next week.

One Nightstand

• Right now I’m reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, which has been brilliant—some of the most clarifying and incisive work I’ve read about our tech climate of hyper-circulation and artificial intelligence. Will be sharing more thoughts and excerpts soon!

• Also reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, the story of redhead boy making his way through his upbringing in Appalachia (loosely inspired by Dickens’s David Copperfield). Loving it so far—such a distinct narrator!

Ok, gotta go bc I have to get ready for Lolla Day 3 (my feet hurt so bad, but I’m having so much fun!!!)! Prompt of the week will be re: seasonal reading recs and if you’d like to see them again, which I’ll post a poll on Insta.

Thanks for reading!!

Love,

Jen

Hope you’re all having great weekends! To those of you who read my folklore article for Teen Vogue, thank you SO much for your support—it was truly so much fun to write, and I’ve loved the conversations I’ve had with you about it! So cool to share some of the ideas that first started fledging last spring when I was TAing the Taylor class at Harvard. If you missed the article, you can read it here.

Since I spent most of my writing time this week on the Taylor article, today’s SubStack is less involved than my typical long-form essay.

As most of you know, I am a big reader—one of the #1 ways to perk me up is to ask me what I’m reading. I love talking about books and recommending them. And, so, I thought a little summer reading guide would be fun 😊 Sort of a “one nightstand” segment, expanded.

Lmk if you’ve read any of these or plan to! I assigned each of the books a song and (shocker) there’s a lot of Lana <3

Next week I’ll be back to my regular format!

Active Listener’s Summer Reading Guide

If you’re having a wistful summer and yearn for stunningly beautiful writing, read…

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Summer reading setting: Your grandma’s back porch just past sunset, sipping tea that’s gone cold and listening to the night’s cicadas.

In 2020’s late spring, a mother tells her three grown daughters the story of the summer she dated now-famous-actor Peter Duke. That summer, however, would also be the last of her girlhood, when her life seemed to swell and flush like the ripe apples hanging on her family’s orchard trees. I loved how, as readers, we watch our narrator decide what to tell her daughters of her youthful summer romance; what of it to whisper at night to her steady and warm husband; and what she keeps for herself, and for us, alone. Filled with gorgeous, summer-spun language and subtle, but stirring, emotional insight.

Song: “Mythological Beauty” by Big Thief

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Summer Reading Setting: A solo day-date to your city’s local and overcrowded watering hole. The day is filled with more friction—and loneliness—than you hoped. Your sweat drips down your back.

A tense, often painful, novel that takes place over one late-summer weekend in a lakeside Midwestern college town. Wallace, our protagonist, is a deeply private Black and queer man navigating his nearly all-white graduate program’s cohort. We follow him across confrontations, hook-ups, and conversations, as the reality of the hostility Wallace faces distills in the lake-locked August heat.

Song: “Polly” by Moses Sumney

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

Summer Reading Setting: Sitting on the aluminum bleachers while waiting for a sibling’s sports game to be over.

Twenty years after the Lisbon sisters’ disturbing, successive suicides, the neighborhood group of boys that obsessed over the girls reflect on their lives and deaths in one shared, unforgettable voice. This is one of those books written in such particular and elegant detail that certain lines haunt me as if they were my own memories. This book is so good. If you can check out an anniversary copy with Emma Cline’s preface, I highly recommend!

Song: “Sun Bleached Flies” by Ethel Cain

If you’re feeling listless, low key about to crash out, and love “women-on-the-verge” literature, read…

The Guest by Emma Cline

Summer Reading Setting: A cabana at a boutique hotel’s pool you’re definitely not supposed to be at.

A slim and spiky novel that boldly asks: What if a young woman behaved completely inappropriately for 300-pages straight? In the hydrangea-blooming languor of Long Island’s moneyed East End, Alex commits a faux-pas against her older lover and is promptly thrown out of his luxurious summer home. Instead of trekking back to NYC, where her debts have caught up with her, she scams her way across the Hamptons, freeloading from troubled teens, house-sharing young professionals, personal assistants, and well-off homeowners. Written with a torpid glamour, The Guest is propulsive—like reading about Georgina from Gossip Girl’s summer trip, if she also was kinda Ultraviolence-era Lana. Plus, the cover is so chic (shoutout Harry).

Song: “Shades of Cool” by Lana Del Rey

Luster by Raven Leilani

Summer Reading Setting: An airless train car ripe with people-watching possibilities.

Nearly every sentence in this book is surprising—absolutely precise and unflinching in its candor. Edie is aimless when she meets Eric, a married man who quickly becomes her lover. She ends up living at his house with his wife, a medical examiner of autopsies, and their adopted daughter in a bizarre twist of events. I remember reading this so quickly a couple of summers ago!

Song: “Whipped Cream” by Ari Lennox

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

Summer Reading Setting: A plane ride back from a low-key bender with the fan blasting straight on you.

You know I had to get some Elena Ferrante in here! Honestly, I’d recommend any of her books (duh). This is the one I’m currently reading (and savoring since it’s my last new one of hers). When our protagonist’s husband suddenly leaves her, she fears transforming into the poverella, or a poor, wrenching, heartsick woman abandoned by her man. This descent, however, is exactly what Ferrante brilliantly complicates in The Days of Abandonment as we follow our speaker’s sweltering madness. Ferrante is forever my fav and, with thirty pages left, I can confirm this is another unforgettable work by her. Obviously, if you haven’t read the Neapolitan quartet (or her most recent novel, The Lying Life of Adults), summer is a perfect time to start—and to have your life changed!

Song: “Honeymoon” by Lana Del Rey

I’m in a reading slump, and I need to be totally absorbed…

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

Summer Reading Setting: The top bunk at summer camp late at night, pages illuminated by your rusty blue flashlight.

An incredibly well-done mystery with an evocative setting, multiple timelines, and a compelling range of character perspectives. One August morning—camp counselors still hungover, campers still in their bunks—the 13-year-old daughter of the family that owns the camp goes missing. Fourteen years ago, her younger brother also vanished—and has never been found.

Moore does an amazing job balancing different narrators and, as a reader, it’s thrilling piecing together information (you feel a bit like a detective yourself!). The Adirondack mountain setting of the book is palpable, and the novel even comes with a map of the summer camp at the beginning. The tension between the wealthy Van Laar family that owns the camp and the working-class community who maintains it crafts a compelling class commentary. This book is like 400+ pages, but doesn’t feel like it at all!

Song: “Feel Flows” by the Beach Boys

Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley

Summer Reading Setting: Emerging from a lazy day to speed-read before you and your friends from college start pre-gaming to your best throwback playlist.

Read it before it becomes an A24 movie! (Starring Saorise Ronan and Austin Butler, which… perfect casting, tbh). One fall 2000 night at a local Berkeley college-student dive bar, Percy Marks is spouting off about music—specifically, what makes something a great “track” v. a great “song” (see caption below)? Joe Morrow, golden-boy-incarnate and aspiring musician, is the recipient of her rantings, and the two quickly strike up a collaborative artistic relationship, sometimes veering into romance, sometimes fizzling out and ignoring one another completely.

This book was sooo nostalgic for the 2000s music scene and reminded me of the becomings of my own musical taste. We get to watch Percy find her voice, both as a music critic and producer, across NYC and San Francisco. Each chapter of the book is named after a song that is featured in its plot. I had so much fun listening to the official playlist and revisiting old favorites and discovering new ones. Plus, it’s a good romance and coming-of-age!

Song: “Heartbeats” by The Knife and “The Sound” by the 1975 (It’s a book about music, so it gets two).

My Body by Emily Ratajkowski

Summer Reading Setting: Staying in on a night where all your friends are out so that you can listen to Lana and think deeply about womanhood lol.

If you’re watching Too Much, here’s your chance to read essays by the actress behind “Wendy Jones.”

I picked up My Body on the used-books sales rack at Brookline Booksmith back in Boston after reading EmRata’s viral (and insightful) essay in The Cut, “Buying My Body Back.” Her collection of essays exceeded my expectations: Ratajkowski unflinchingly reflects on her own privileges and histories of abuse as a supermodel, while also speaking perceptively to an American culture that prizes women’s beauty and punishes them for it.

I consumed Ratajkowski’s essays in one emotional night back in my old Boston bedroom—I remember choosing My Body over going out to Trina’s (huge during that era of life)! I felt so deeply seen by so much of what Ratajkowski offered, and it allowed me to look back on huge pop culture moments from my adolescence (“Blurred Lines,” for example) with more nuance. Great for fans of Jia Tolentino and sharp, self-aware cultural criticism.

Song: “A&W” by Lana Del Rey

I want to think deeply about time, art, and friendship…

Stay True by Hua Hsu

Summer Reading Setting: The closest college coffeehouse, quietly observing the summer-lingerers social dynamics and references.

In this memoir, Hua Hsu and fellow Berkeley student, Ken, are total opposites: Hsu makes alternative zines and prefers to be alone, while Ken styles himself in Abercrombie and is typically encircled by his fraternity brothers. The two, nevertheless, become close friends, bonding over movies, long drives, and their shared, yet often disparate, navigations of their Asian American identities (Ken is Japanese American and his family has lived in the U.S. for generations; Hsu is the son of Taiwanese immigrants and reviles mainstream U.S. culture).

When Ken is murdered in a carjacking, Hsu turns to writing to grasp onto their friendship and make sense of himself. This book combines incredible cultural histories and insights with the question, “who has the right to claim grief?”

Song: “Star” by Mitski

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

Summer Reading Setting: Sitting on the edge of Lake Michigan at golden hour, feet in the water, grateful to be alive, but also missing all the moments you’ve lived before this one.

Ugh. How to even summarize The Great Believers? This novel navigates two timelines: One begins in 1985 as AIDs infects Yale Tishman’s entangled, creative circle of queer friends in Chicago; thirty years later, Fiona, the sister of one of Yale’s first friends to die from the disease, searches Paris for her estranged daughter, while staying with an artist who photographed Yale and Fiona’s close-knit community during their last days.

Makkai paces The Great Believers’ plot perfectly and, if you’ve ever lived off of / stayed near the Belmont stop in Lakeview, Chicago, you’ll feel eerily rooted in place. A devastating reflection of art, friendship, loss, and memory, it also raises interesting questions on what it means for a straight woman (Makkai) to author a leading account of the AIDs epidemic—ultimately, I agree with her remarks in my copy’s afterword Q&A: it’s a story that needs to be told. And, god, does she tell it so well.

Song: “Fourth of July” by Sufjan Stevens, but also “Believe” by Cher

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? By Lorrie Moore

Summer reading setting: Midnight with your bedroom window open, the thick, oak-tree air floating onto your pilled-flannel bedsheets.

I can only think of a handful of literary passages that have moved me as deeply as the last fifty pages of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, Moore’s tour-de-force of girlhood memory. Our speaker, Berie, and her best friend, Sils, work at an amusement park called Storyland in upstate, almost-Québécois New York, where they pass their time sharing cigarettes, gossip, and boy-crazy schemes.

Another split-timeline novel, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? asks the ever-relatable question: Why, even after a lifetime of adventure, travel, and adult luxury, do the things that happened when we were nineteen feel the most urgent and important? And how deeply do we really know the close friends that starred in that time of our lives—or, were they always just projections of who we wanted to grow up and be? What happens when we evolve beyond them, and old versions of us, but never truly forget (or outdo) how those late-adolescent days felt?

Song: “Little Green” by Joni Mitchell

Here’s a playlist with all my picks’ songs :)

If you liked this week’s post, let me know! I’m considering making “one nightstand”-style seasonal reading recs a recurring feature on here.

Prompt of the week: Would you be interested in an “autumn reading list” in October? (I’ll post a survey on Insta). Was this recommendation format fun/helpful?

Also, based on the poll I put out on insta on Friday, I’ll be writing about why we don’t have a song of the summer next week and what that means culturally. It was a close vote though! My other story ideas were a review of Lena Dunham’s new show (starring Meg Stalter) “Too Much” and an exploration of envy as a generative emotion. I’ll definitely be covering both topics in the future, so don’t worry if your vote didn’t win lol.

Thanks for reading, and support your local library!

Love,

Jen

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Dear all,

Hi :) How are you holding up in the dog days of summer? It is low key crash out season, but we’ve got this!!

Yesterday I went swimming at McKinney Falls for a friend in Austin’s bday. It was so beautiful! My dad and I hiked here back in December when he was in town, and it was wild seeing how different the park looks in July.

This week, I’m covering a topic VERY dear to my heart: Sex and the City and why I’m not watching the new season of … And Just Like That. Let’s get into it!

Sorry I Don’t Want to Hate Watch Something I Once Loved aka Why I’m Abstaining From This Season of And Just Like That…

When And Just Like That… first came out—back when Mr. Big’s death-inducing Peloton bike was still warm and Che Diaz memes were still novel—I described the show as “fanfiction that got produced.” I joked with fellow Sex and the City stans that the show was enjoyable only if you suspended disbelief and accepted it for what it was: An uncanny-valley shoot-off of SATC, populated with our favorite girls acting nothing like their former selves. If SATC was our bible, AJLT was our Book of Mormon. (Which makes the movies the Catholic Church’s Seven Sacraments? Idk losing the analogy a bit here).

However, fanfiction—aka fan-written stories about preexisting characters—is, at its best, an exercise of love for a work of fiction. It is a way for fans to prolong their relationships to particular works of art through creative writing. And while fanfiction drastically varies in quality and canon-compliance, it is ultimately an act of real devotion to a story and its characters.

This definition makes me amend my earlier assessment of AJLT: The reboot isn’t fanfiction; that would require love. AJLT is just plain greed. Or, as some fans have semi-jokingly hypothesized, it’s a ChatGPT-generated experiment, engineered to teach us the pitfalls of artificial intelligence.

When I told my dad I would be writing about the SATC reboot and my choice to abstain from the newest season, he immediately cited his own example of franchise-reup heartbreak: The 2019 live-action Kim Possible movie. Later, on Monday morning, as Brenton drove me to LAX, I explained my agony towards AJLT by saying, “It’s like my version of when the Avatar movie came out,” referencing the panned film sequel of Brenty’s most beloved animated series.

We all have versions of the ire and sadness I feel towards AJLT: An instance where a cherished piece of media, that has been central to our becoming, is tainted by an ill-constructed adaptation. Somehow it cuts deeper than the plain disappointment of a book you were looking forward to not quite being up to expectations, or a favored director’s recent film flopping. It’s personal. It’s a betrayal! You feel not only the loss of the sequel that could-have-been, but—at least in my case with SATC—fundamentally misunderstood. Do the reboot’s creators really not perceive what made you adore the original so much? With AJLT (and, even, the SATC movie sequels), I feel like, as a fan, I’ve been reduced to a consumer, one who blindly follows sparkly designer shoes and mirages of fabulousity in lieu of real quality. The AJLT enterprise is using me for my loyalty, creating a whole ecosystem of companion podcasts and merchandise meant to generate even more revenue from my steadfast fandom. Just like the reboot, these additives miss the point: It was the tenor of real women’s stories—their memorable textures and deep friendships—that endeared me to the original Sex and the City, not merely Carrie’s choices in footwear.

What makes a poorly executed reboot cut so deep? Are sequels to the most cherished and popular works of media always doomed to disappoint their fans? How do you know when your fidelity to a franchise has been pushed too far?

At this point, I wish the SATC team had never made And Just Like That… But, for most of my life, I would’ve done anything to spend more time with Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda. Our lore runs deep—back to prepubescence, even. And maybe that’s why I’m so upset: I can’t let go enough to tune in.

Sex and the City and Me

I remember my first encounter with Sex and the City as clearly as my first period (unfinished basement; age ten; during a short-lived time in which I was attempting to learn tennis): It was summer, and my family and I were on our annual pilgrimage to rural Virginia to visit family friends and my mom’s sister. These were days filled with red Kool-Aid and glitter gel pens; splashing in the backyard pool and having our moms call a hotline to get the time and temperature; and staging original plays with my childhood bestie, Emilie, which somehow always starred orphans (Annie was top of mind back then). At night, I fell asleep in silky blue pajamas that twinned with Emilie’s pink ones. I waited for July all school year.

During one of these summer visits—looking back, probably the last one before my parents’ divorce—we were spending the day at my aunt’s. My aunt was obsessed with collector Barbies and would sometimes escort me through different rooms of her house so I could “view” the dolls (Back then I remember thinking that this activity was cutting into valuable rehearsal time with Emilie <3).

In the midst of such a tour, something caught my eye: A deep, hot pink box, flushed and slightly fuzzy, as if constructed by the same great minds as Juicy Couture velour (honestly, possible). A skyline was embossed on the front of the box, piped in a lighter pink—I knew it must be Manhattan (of Annie fame). Emblazoned on the front and side were four words that would eventually become home to me: SEX AND THE CITY.

Although I wasn’t allowed to play with my Aunt’s Barbies, I was (inexplicably) permitted to examine this boxset. It was the greatest consolation prize ever. The Sex and the City collector’s boxset—which contained all six seasons—was a dark-magenta portal to a glamourous womanhood I hadn’t known existed. This mysterious velvet container signaled another path, one radically outside the world of my county-fair and Pampered-Chef-party youth. Here was proof that you could make a life as a writer in an exciting city surrounded by close friends: That real-life people (at least, real-life TV people) were living like my Barbie (a professional author who lived next door to Oprah). I can’t emphasize enough how powerful this was to me at age 9: This cosmopolitan-soaked door to a fabulous Narnia.

Sex and the City beckoned me into a world of adult language and adult desires. When I first started actually watching the show in eighth grade, I was enthralled not just by the show’s romances, but—even moreso, at that age—by the lives these women lived. Every single camera shot of Carrie in her iconic studio apartment perched in front of her laptop—with an alternating cigarette, martini, or cup of coffee cup in hand—was like an inspirational classroom poster to me (the kinds that have DREAM BIG written on them). When Carrie tells her fashion-photographer flirtation in “The Real Me” that she sometimes bought Vogue instead of dinner because she “felt it fed her more,” I recognized the sentiment—that’s how I felt about Sex and the City.

I was nourished by these women and their friendships, fashions, and freedoms. Carrie modeled a writer’s life brimming with love and adventure, something that, back then, felt accessible to me only via silver screen. As an adolescent, I needed Sex and the City so adulthood felt worth dreaming about.

Since those early-adolescent days of sneaking Sex and the City episodes, my relationship with the show has only deepened. I actually can’t remember the first time I watched the series all the way through just that it was always there. Certain SATC episodes—“My Motherboard, Myself;” “The Real Me;” “Take Me Out to the Ballgame;” “The Agony and the ‘Ex’-tacy” and countless others—have become talismanic for me, and I return to them, always, when I need them most.

By grad school, I was rewatching SATC every single summer as my own little marker-of-the-seasons. The spring air would give way to summer’s humidity and I would return to HBO Max, the jaunty piano a doorbell into my favorite house (or studio apartment). In a treasured memory from visiting Ohio last June, Soph and I timed an episode of SATC on my phone to sync up with Elli’s, and we all watched together from our bunk-beds. The three of us drifted off like kids at summer camp, our sleep scored by the sounds of the SATC girls’ chatter.

So, Sex and the City means a lot to me. The opening line of the book Sex and the City and Us, an incredible deep-dive of the series’ history and impact by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, is “I left my fiancé for Sex and the City.” As an eighth grader, I obviously didn’t have a fiancé to leave, but honestly? If I did, I would’ve left him if it meant I could live like Carrie & co.

Many others have enduring, fiancé-leaving connections to SATC. While prepping to write this article, I read accounts from other critics and fans who have weighed on whether AJLT was “worth it.” A common refrain: It’s only worth it if I put my love for the original aside. But, when it comes to the art that makes us, don’t we always carry our fan-love into our experience of it?

And Just Like That… Isn’t So Bad It’s Good. It’s Unwatchable.

I first knew we were in trouble in an early AJLT episode when Miranda loudly proclaims that she doesn’t understand technology. Was this our BlackBerry-obsessed, TiVo-codependent, ever-savvy-corporate-lawyer Miranda Hobbes? People and their relationships with technology change with time, of course, but everything about Miranda—from her overly-enthused tone to her indefatigable incompetence—was suddenly a cartoon imitation of our sardonic redhead, as if Hobbes had been sketched from memory by someone’s boyfriend who only half-watched the show.

As countless others have attested, this was just the beginning of Miranda’s character assassination. While I appreciate the writers’ goal of having a central character explore her sexuality, AJLT does so at the expense of all else we know about Miranda. This actually does a great disservice to queer representation. Imagine how much more powerful it would be to follow the Miranda (or even Charlotte!) we know and love as she reckons with new understandings of her desire in middle-age. From what I’ve heard about season three, Miranda’s mischaracterization has only worsened: In a recent episode, Miranda gushes over decorative balloons and cowers when an (also unrecognizable) Carrie berates her during their post-party debrief. In SATC, Miranda only acquiesced to having a baby shower when Charlotte volunteered to plan it and demanded it be zero-percent cutesy. More importantly, Miranda was always the one to call Carrie on her bullshit and never floundered in her point of view (sometimes to a fault). Samantha never judged Carrie, and Charlotte met her with their shared senses of romanticism and sensitivity—it was Miranda who kept Carrie clear-eyed when she needed it most.

Speaking of Carrie’s other iconic besties: Samantha is gone, and her absence drains AJLT of SATC’s authentic vigor. Charlotte is the only character that shines on AJLT, perhaps because York was always the member of the core four most focused on appearances.

This brings me to Carrie, whose change-of-character is perhaps even more egregious than Miranda’s. As Bradshaw has become more synonymous with Sarah Jessica Parker—an executive producer on both the original SATC and AJLT—she’s lost her messy edge. The Carrie of AJLT is positively sanctimonious. She outright refuses to discuss her sex life while co-hosting a literal sex podcast. She scorns her friends for their chaos from her lofted palace of her and (mostly) Big’s fortune, while barely seeming to remember she was married to (and famously obsessed with) him for decades. The only time I recognized Carrie on AJLT is when, in season one, she stalks Big’s ex-wife, Natasha, to find out why he left her money in his will.

Carrie’s selfishness and impracticality is part of what made the original Sex and the City series so compelling; her poor financial and romantic judgement was relatable, and we, as fans, cringed and commiserated as she flung herself down fruitless paths in pursuit of “ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't-live-without-each-other love.” Yes, Carrie would have been a better person if she didn’t cheat on Aidan with Big, or if she listened to her friends more, or if she was more responsible with her money, etc. but she wouldn’t have been a better character. And we watch TV for good characters, not good people.

^ literally

As AJLT’s writers endlessly sacrifice Miranda to HBO Max’s gods of humiliation, they gloss over every imperfection of Carrie’s. Those flaws not only made Sex and the City exciting, but they changed television. SATC foregrounded a female protagonist who wasn’t perfect—who, on the surface, may have been aspirational, but when you got deeper into her psyche, had a lot of work to do. In doing so, the show “originated the unacknowledged first female anti-hero on television,” as celebrated New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum argues in her fantastic essay, “Difficult Women.” Nussbaum writes:

Carrie and her friends [were] … jagged, aggressive, and sometimes frightening figures, like a makeup mirror lit up in neon. They were simultaneously real and abstract, emotionally complex and philosophically stylized. Women identified with them—'I’m a Carrie!’—but then became furious when they showed flaws. And, with the exception of Charlotte (Kristin Davis), men didn’t find them likable: there were endless cruel jokes about Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Carrie as sluts, man-haters, or gold-diggers. To me, as a single woman, it felt like a definite sign of progress: since the elemental representation of single life at the time was the comic strip “Cathy” (ack! chocolate!), better that one’s life should be viewed as glamorously threatening than as sad and lonely.

AJLT retains none of SATC’s threatening glamour, emotional complexity, or philosophical provocation. It lives exclusively on and for the surface, and this is the deepest loss from the original. I could hate-watch it, but I’d be facing off with a veneer.

What I, and so many other fans, loved about SATC was its ability to take four archetypes of modern (albeit highly privileged) women and add detail, depth, and pathos to their inner lives. In this way, the series critiqued the broader national culture: Particularly in the late-90s and early-2000s, society maligned thirty-something single women as frivolous, over-sexed, work-obsessed, pathological, and pathetic. SATC took these accusations to task through a witty and winning central ensemble who proved that their existence was more than a Cathy cartoon. These women fashioned their worlds, and their personas amounted to more than their corresponding cliches. They took the scripts media had contained them inside and complicated their contours.

As is documented in Sex and the City and Us, Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte’s misadventures and friendships were inspired by the real-life accounts of the series’ writing team. Every morning, a group of mostly young women living in New York would carpool in a production van on the way to the SATC writers’ room. In that van, they debriefed horrible dating sagas, crush-of-the-week quandaries, intricate disagreements with girlfriends, and more. I like to imagine that van—the pre-writer’s room site of creativity—as a space where the women and gay men who worked on the show got to honestly speak back to the limited roles afforded to them elsewhere.

The creative team behind Sex and the City, of course, made several missteps: As a show about four wealthy white women, the show featured almost zero diversity—sexually and racially—and, when it did, the writers drew from harmful stereotypes and/or sketched empty characterizations. Although AJLT includes characters of color, it does not depict them with the care or depth that their actors—nor the identities their stories purport to represent—deserve. AJLT’s awkward attempts to “do diversity” feel like items on a checklist meant to absolve the original series of all its tone-deaf sins. Diverse stories should never feel like a checklist: They should be treated with the same amount of nuance and messiness that made me love Sex and the City in the first place. AJLT simply has too much going on at any given moment to give any of its new cast members and their storylines the proper level of attention and intention.

And Just Like That… used to make me angry and now it straight-up makes me sad. The show’s hollowness only reminds me of thrilling vibrancy I once found holding that collector’s box set at age 9; the cozy, choking-back-tears comfort I’ve found in the show’s raw tellings of sisterhood, heartbreak, humiliation, and aging. It’s a sadness akin to one I felt back in eighth grade, when a boy found out how much I loved SATC and did a lengthy impression of me for our whole class, in which I yapped about how obsessed I was with shoes in a valley-girl pitch (Anyone who actually knows me, knows that… I should honestly care more about what I put on my feet. I’m shopaholic, but no shoe-aholic).

As he did his impression, my skin burned with the hot-shame of girlishness, but also the pang of being so misunderstood. I didn’t love SATC for the stilettos. I could not care less about Manolo Blahniks. I loved it for the women, and especially Carrie, who wove an electric portrait of an independent, fulfilling, and creative life in the big city, one where you were surrounded by—and deeply seen by—your best friends. AJLT sometimes feels just like that boy and his impression: Turning something I loved with particular and pure earnest into a shallow puppet-play of womanhood.

Whenever we consume a narrative work of art—whether it’s a novel or a sitcom—we enter into a contract with its authors. We trust that they will take care of us—their audience—and that they know where they’re going. That any pain our beloved characters suffer will be worth it for the sake of a well-crafted and resonant story. With AJLT, the SATC team has broken this contract. And so, as a SATC fan, I’m breaking mine.

One Nightstand

• On Friday night, I saw Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor’s directorial debut) at the Alamo Drafthouse. It was truly the most thoughtful, hilarious, and profound depiction of the survival of sexual trauma I’ve ever seen on screen. Debating writing about it soon. Go see it!!!

• Savoring The Days of Abandonment—once I’m done, I’ll have read all of my girl Elena Ferrante’s works! The novel is narrated by a woman who’s husband has just left her, and we follow her spiral in the aftermath. It’s a perfect “woman on the verge book,” written with Ferrante’s typical insight, honesty, and brilliance. I keep thinking about this one line, where the protagonist speaks to her desire for her (ex)-husband to “collaborate in [her] labor of self-analysis,” as she tries to figure out when and how their relationship fell apart. Isn’t this all we want post- any kind of relational estrangement—to know that the other party is willing to share the burden of obsessing over what went wrong?

Prompt of the Week

• What’s a reboot you should’ve been (or should be) in the writer’s room for?

Also, loved your song of the summer responses. I think mine would be Slide feat. Frank Ocean and Migos by Calvin Harris for summer 2017…. It was just the vibe. And a song I loved, but feel like I only really listened to that summer.

Your answer:

• “Never Be Like You - Flume summer 2016"

• “Summer 2008: Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed a Girl’ - backpacking through Europe before college'“

• “Party in the USA or California Gurls take me bacccckkkkk. Superbass as well!”

• “I Know A Place - MUNA // Summer 2019 (late summer—August/September).

• “your best american girl by mitski tbh lol”

• “sour patch kids (lol) taking me back to the summer before college started!”

One More Thing: SATC-related Rec That Isn’t AJLT

I can’t recommend Sentimental Garbage’s “Sentimental in the City” podcast series, hosted by Caroline O’Donoghue (author of one of my favorite books EVER, The Rachel Incident) and Dolly Alderton (writer of Everything I Know About Love, a very Carrie-coded collection of essays, and Good Material). These girlies get SATC in a way that makes me feel seen profoundly!!!! I don’t even listen to podcasts (infamously), and I love this one so much. Endless thanks to my bestie Kaylee for changing my life with this rec.

Ok, til next week!

Love,

Jen

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Hi! Shorter post this week because IT’S BRENTY’S BIRTHDAY AHHH meaning we’re full-sending it in La La Land feat. Catalina (yes, of the wine mixers). Here are some thoughts on Lorde’s Virgin, which was released two Fridays ago (and which, for the most part, I’ve loved, although I agree with some takes I’ve seen that it loses momentum in the second half):

Lorde is Born Again on Virgin

Lorde’s hot youth has cooled on Virgin, leaving her with mirrors of transformation. The album is an exploration of intimacy with oneself after your twenties’ frenzy. We listen as Lorde comes into her adult body, making sense of her gender expression and matriline with a raw curiosity scored by synthetic drums. “I might have been born again,” she sings on the album opener, “I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers.”

Virgin is a kind of second adolescence, one in which Lorde harnesses the intensity of her interiority towards sublime self-(re)discovery. If her other albums are concerned with narrative—of how to best capture her stories of coming-of-age, romance, and actualization through the specificity of song—Virgin is more interested what it means to be your own muse. Lorde’s pen transforms into a hammer: Her body and its truths are hers to chip and mold.

Super-Chill Scorpio Sisters: Lorde and Me

When Melodrama came out, I was on fire. I don’t mean I was “in the zone,” or hitting some kind of winning streak—I mean I constantly felt like my skin was aflame, that a lava-broil prickled beneath me at every hour. My days were a near-constant mix of adrenaline and discomfort, some epiphany sharp then gone again by nightfall, drained with my double vodka tonic.

During that time—summer, 2017—I lived in a college house on East Norwich in Columbus, Ohio, subletting the basement with some of the best roommates I’ve had to date (an area of my life where I’ve been tremendously lucky, tbh). My room was next to the laundry machines and it was, naturally, dim and damp, like living inside a cotton swab. Every night, I fell asleep to the smell of dryer sheets, the drum of the washer, and the stale thickness of the air. I had a slight cold that whole July.

I had graduated from Miami one month ago and found myself in a fit of post-grad restlessness; I spent the season tossing and turning, even while awake. When Lorde released her “Green Light” music video, in which she stomps across Manhattan in a deep mauve dress, I resonated with her resolve, its ferocity and aimlessness. In my ’02 Accord, I spat the lyric She thinks you love the beach, you’re such a damn liar with such venom you’d think I wrote the line (or had a personal vendetta against boys on beaches). One of my new roommates and I texted “Supercut” lyrics back-and-forth in all-caps, agreeing it spoke to our respective situations with uncanny precision: “IN MY HEAD I DO EVERYTHING RIGHT” stood bubbled in blue, speaking for itself. “WHEN YOU CALL I FORGIVE AND NOT FIGHT.” Two months later, I lived in Chicago, and when I looked out the El window, I listened to “Writer in the Dark” like a prayer, hoping the seasons might change my mind.

Lorde was born exactly 364 days after me—November 7, 1996 (And, like me, she suffers from the quintessentially Scorpio affliction of taking yourself too seriously). When, at sixteen, her song “Royals” (2013) anointed her an indie-pop wunderkind, she felt like a gifted peer. As a high school senior, I too, was driving around suburbs and drinking on tennis courts; I didn’t write an album about it, of course, but that mundanity felt of opus-import—I wondered: Was nothing happening, or everything? How do you know when your life has really, actually begun?

Nearly every interview or review of Lorde during that time hailed her wisdom for her age. An artist “beyond her years,” her sagacity lied in her ability to make the unspectacular glimmer and snap. “We live in cities, you’ll never see on screen,” she famously snarled. “Not very pretty, but we sure know how to run things.”

By Melodrama, Lorde and I had both lived enough to have regrets, but our youth was fresh enough for them to feel novel, or maybe even reversible, if we could play a night-out’s cards just right. By Solar Power, we sought wellness, were desperate for bliss, even if we didn’t quite know how to go about either.

All this to say…. I feel like I really get where Lorde’s at on Virgin. Before her recent album’s title was officially announced, there were rumors that it would be called “After the ecstasy, the laundry,” a reference to a book on spiritual enlightenment by Jack Kornfield. On Virgin standout, “Clearblue,” Lorde sings a new version of the line: “After the ecstasy, testing for pregnancy.” This line details a particular scene in the singer’s life: That strange confrontation with plastic and biology as the past-due-period days accumulate, when you misinterpret every sensation with the hope of that red safety signal. Yet, it also concisely represents the themes of Virgin—after the ecstasy, aka the just-post-adolescent fervor of Melodrama, testing for pregnancy, aka the possibility for parenthood suddenly available. The line gestures at one of the grander questions that tugs at Virgin: What comes after youth and before maturity? When you’re not quite the wise woman you dreamed you would be, but you can no longer convincingly cast yourself as the ingenue? Who are you when you’re no longer the maiden, but not quite the queen?

Virgin starts with “Hammer” and ends with “David,” a reference to the iconic sculpture. If Lorde is wielding a hammer, as I suggested above, she’s chipping away at “David” on her own accord. Here, Lorde recasts her relationship as an artist with a muse: Whereas, on Melodrama’s “The Louvre” she professed that her and lover belong among the greats of Western art (“Down the back, but who cares…. Still the Louvre”), on Virgin, it is her perspective that makes something art—or, rather, she intimates that her perception is art itself. She is no longer concerned with the narrative of her romance, how it appears externally, but is interested in the “nails” she seeks, the ways in which she sculpts and constructs her own life.

Much of Virgin is about sex, its specific—even gnarly—textures. Yet, even in scenes of intimacy with a partner, the focus is on Lorde: Her need to be touched, still, after everything. Virgin is interested in perception that doesn’t feel like consumption, but being seen. On “Hammer,” Lorde gets an aura picture taken, hoping it shows her who she is. She watches Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape on “Current Affairs,” muses that “it was pure and true,” before the film “came out.” Anderson and Lee meant for the tape to be private, and its leak is a violation; even while Lorde finds beauty in it, she wonders about the ethics of pursuing pleasure. “Would you dive to the ocean floor / Just to take my pearl?” she sings a line later, which I read as both an inquiry into her lover’s endurance and a wariness of capture—the diver travels fathoms to “take” something precious, private, and sacred: That can be real intimacy or cruel seizure, depending on the context of consent.

On “Man of the Year,” Lorde becomes her own lover. She breaks herself open in a way no one else could. When she sings “Some days I’m a woman / Some days I’m a man,” that is a declaration for herself, a firm and indisputable account of how it really feels to be in her own body, at last. On an album standout, “Shapeshifter,” Lorde reflects on her objectification, how she has played endless roles as a woman and had them cast for her:

I’ve been the ice, I’ve been the flame

I’ve been the prize, the ball, the chain

I’ve been the dice, the magic eight

So I’m not affected

I’ve been the siren, been the saint

I’ve been the fruit that leaves a stain

I’ve been up on the pedestal

But tonight I just wanna fall

That “fall” is a reprieve from shapeshifting for others’ gazes, from being contained to the pedestal. Lorde cycles through archetypes of womanhood—the siren, the saint, a fruit-eating Eve—and ultimately claims her desire to discard them. This desire crystallizes again on “Broken Glass,” a song that chronicles Lorde’s relationship with disordered eating; She wants to shatter the glass of her appearance, her obsession with and punishing of her frame. She worries that smashing might be “years of bad luck,” before ruminating that it might “just be broken glass.” What if, instead of constantly searching and assigning narrative value to ourselves, we took things as they are—broken glass as simple shards, a pedestal fallen, a body, alive and moving?

What comes after youth and before maturity? Motherhood is another theme on Virgin, where Lorde repeatedly performs for hers, seeking approval (particularly on “Favorite Daughter”).

Listening to Lorde call on her mother, I thought of mine, how she was 27 when she had me, an age that I am now two years past. Some days I wonder if I am behind on growing up, but most days I feel stunned with gratitude that I get to do so many things at 29—to have lived and travelled to so many cities, to have had years devoted expressly to finding myself and my voice—that, perhaps, my own mother would not have dared dream of. The Virgin cover is an X-ray of Lorde’s pelvis, displaying her IUD, by photographer Heji Shin, who is best known for her images of crowning newborns. The cover suggests creativity as a kind of pregnancy; Lorde is giving birth to herself. Maybe that’s what this time of life is all about.

As I write this, I am on a plane en route to my best friend’s birthday. A young boy falls asleep on his mother’s lap and she absentmindedly combs his gold hair with her fingers. She’s sipping complimentary coffee and watching Crazy Rich Asians (aka the plane movie). If that is my destiny—and I hope it is—I should savor this: This sitting alone, my fingers on the keyboard as if I am sticking my hands inside a magic shoebox, feeling around for whatever comes out and hoping it comes true. Space to search within myself as I fly to the people I love. Between youth and maturity, maiden and mother, and naivety and wisdom, there’s an intimacy with the self, a coming into your body and all it’s been through thus far that it’s irreplaceable. That trust can be the amulet you take with you as you ripen and age—yes, it took time, and it’ll take some more. That’s the gift of getting to begin, to be born, again and again.

One Nightstand:

- I finished Matryr! And it was truly transcendent. So powerful and beautifully written. Will maybe write a lengthier post about it in the future, but for now, I’m still thinking about these two sentences: “An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it one can produce almost anything.” And: “Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it. Cyrus understood that now, and stepped.”

- It’s officially full-on summer, which means two things: I’m doing my annual SATC rewatch and reading Elena Ferrante. Started The Days of Abandonment (only one of hers I haven’t read) in-flight, and ofc, loving it so far.

- Being w/ Brenty (and Ri! And Poki!) for the birthweek means my nightstands look, gloriously, something like this rn:

Prompt of the Week:

• What is your ultimate song of the summer? Like which track just takes you BACK to the specific summer.

Love,

Jen

Hi! Last weekend I saw Cowboy Carter with my friend Chloe in Houston aka Queen Bey’s hometown. It was… life-changing. Here are just some of my thoughts on the show (although tbh, this barely scratches the surface—I feel like I could write a whole other dissertation on Cowboy Carter lol).

Cowboy Carter’s Ameri(i)ca

At her Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin' Circuit Tour, Beyoncé begins her party with a funeral. Or, a requiem, to be more precise.

In Beyoncé’s hometown of Houston on a Sunday night, the stadium grew appropriately holy as her audience awaited Knowles-Carter’s entrance and our full-hive transformation. Her stage was shaped like a star and in its center her dancers stood like a choir, dressed in red floor-length robes and matching cowboy hats.

^ Full concert video from 5/25/25 MetLife show.

In the stadium, we hear Beyoncé chant the opening lyrics from above, but we don’t see her; her notes are underscored by the sounds of an organ, as the other vocalists harmonize with her “amen.” Suddenly, with the fierce twang of a guitar, Beyoncé emerges. Her requiem shifts its sound: We are no longer at a funeral mass, but at a rock n’ roll rodeo—the bass warbles and gains momentum, while kick drums and fireworks fill the air like a horse’s gallop. An American flag flashes behind Beyoncé’s cowgirl-and-fur-coat silhouette; “There’s a lot of talking going on,” she sings, pausing for dramatic effect. “While I siing my song.” She lowers her voice and then crescendos it as she turns to plainly address her listener: “Can you hear me? / I said, ‘Do you hear me?’” We, her audience, scream back to her: our yells, our yes.

Beyoncé implores her audiences to pay close attention—to really hear her. The “you” that she beckons shifts across positionalities and environments; at the NRG Stadium her “Can you hear me?” functioned as a welcome to fans, outfitted in their glittering rodeo finest, whereas, on her Cowboy Carter album, the question serves as a provocation and invitation to those who condemned her country crossover.

When I first heard Beyoncé repeat “Can you hear me?”, I thought of her 2016 “Daddy Lessons” performance at the 50^th Country Music Awards (which featured The Chicks); Knowles-Carter was expressly invited by the show’s executive producer and yet the CMA’s audience responded to her with racist hostility—Alan Jackson even walked out in the middle of her performance. Cowboy Carter “was born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed,” Beyoncé has since reflected. “And it was very clear that I wasn’t. But, because of that experience, I did a deeper dive into the history of country music and studied our rich musical archive.”

Beyoncé and The Chicks performing “Daddy Lessons” at the 2016 CMA’s. You can read an oral history of this historical performance here. Fun fact, part of my essay that got me into grad school was about this!

Beyoncé starts Cowboy Carter with “AMERIICAN REQUIEM” precisely because she is providing her listeners with that archival context; you might even say she’s setting the score, both musically and as a Black woman in America, a nation that is anti-Black and patriarchal at its very roots. Her score-setting is a demand for historical engagement. As her audience for the concert’s next three hours, Beyoncé plans to take us on a journey across the U.S. landscape and its mythologies—so many of which coalesce under the genre of country music—on her terms. By immediately placing her biography against the greater milieu of America (and the musical genre made most synonymous with it), Knowles-Carter clarifies she will not only be reflecting upon her singularity as an artist, but placing her career in conversation with the nation’s identity. She dramatizes this discussion through her reclamation of patriotic aesthetics and rigorous citational practice. At the concert, immediately after “AMERIICAN REQUIEM,” Knowles-Carter greets the crowd and dedicates her next song to “all the Black birds that came before [her] and opened the doors for [her], so [she] could be on the stage today.”

As a chronicler of Black history, Beyoncé is concerned with legacy—her own and America’s. One of Cowboy Carter’s main arguments is this: American country music has always been Black, and Black country artists have always been here, defining the genre and critiquing the nation it represents; Beyoncé Knowles-Carter is a part of that great history. Through her traversal of symbols and interrogation of genre, Beyoncé offers us a more multi-dimensional understanding of “legacy”—one that is not about status or control, but about memory and collectivity.

“Can we stand for something?”

A requiem is “a mass for the dead,” a rite that collects its listeners around the hereafter. When did America die—or, maybe more aptly, how many times has it been buried? And what does it mean to mourn a nation whose origin and sustenance depends on the subjugation and killing of others? Beyoncé’s “AMERIICAN REQUIEM” grieves the nation’s “big ideas,” its dreams and promises that are “buried here.” Nothing really ends, she sings, as in systems of white supremacist domination are reinvented again and again, under new “names.” Perhaps it’s not so much that America has died, then, but rather that Beyoncé wants to put its lies of progress to rest in favor of actual transformation.

Two songs later, Knowles-Carter launches into a rendition of the National Anthem: The starred-and-striped stage glitches in red, white, and blue behind her. America is “glitching,” but also Beyoncé is distorting her own virtuosity, by which I mean the supernaturalness that (white) audience members often project onto Black female performers. To make someone “supernatural” is to render them non-human, which is a slippery slope into implying that they don’t feel pain or deserve privacy. Beyoncé breaks down her own perfection, while deconstructing America’s image, thus beginning her tour-length arguments against stasis and respectability. In regards to the former, it is stasis—the idea that there is only one way to be American, to be a Black female musician, to be a country artist, etc.—that Beyoncé blows apart. As she performed her visually fragmented National Anthem at a slightly quickened pace, I felt adrenaline, a rush, as if Beyoncé was channeling America’s deferred dreams and stretching them to burst. Her star-spangled banner gives way to her anthemic “Freedom,” a track from Lemonade that speaks explicitly to Black Americans’ fight for racial justice. “Freedom” says things that National Anthem can’t—about bitter disappointment, ongoing struggle, but also resolute faith in oneself and community. It is a national anthem of sorts, but one that pushes forward, instead of resolves.

At the Cowboy Carter tour, Beyoncé aligns her interrogation of America—her requiems, odes, and anthems for this “land that has never been yet,” to quote another Hughes poem —with country music and its association with “authentic” Americana. Beyoncé’s entry into country, a genre which musical gatekeepers have defined through its proximity to whiteness, is vexed, she explains, because America historically has not valued her, has not even truly listened to her “song.” When Beyoncé, a few songs later in her concert, combines “Ya Ya,” a high-energy tribute to performers on the Chitlin Circuit “keeping the faith” amidst U.S. racism, with her Sasha-Fierce-era banger “Why Don’t You Love Me?”, it seems as if she is asking America directly why it doesn’t love her, when she “makes [herself] so damn easy to love.” Projected on the screens behind her are the words: “This is a reclamation.” And yet, Knowles-Carter’s requiem for America makes clear that any reclamation of America, and by extension, country as a musical genre, requires not only practiced listening, but a studied accounting of the nation’s past, of all that is buried here and recycled again. Or, as she declares in “Ya Ya:” “There’s a whole lotta red in that white and blue, huh / History can’t be erased.”

Still, a requiem does not foreclose a party, in fact, far from it. Beyoncé’s requiem for America is akin to a tradition on her Louisiana side, the New Orleans jazz funeral, in which, once the deceased has been laid to rest, the procession “cuts the body loose” and celebrates—the brass band switches from solemn hymns to up-tempo jazz as family, friends, and other attendees revel in the street. Beyoncé mourns America’s broken promises before cutting the nation’s body loose; after her requiem comes a release, as she “twirls on her haters” and, in turn, encourages her fans to boldly seize their right to dance.

“If that ain’t country, tell me what it is?”

Knowles-Carter’s “crossover” into country is far from novel: As she reminds her audiences throughout the Cowboy Carter, much of what we define as “country” today comes from African American musical traditions. For example, the banjo, which is the instrument most associated with country music, is preceded by West African lutes from countries such as Gambia and Senegal. Enslaved Africans adapted these flutes on plantations, crafting iterations of the banjo; during the 1800s, white Americans played the banjo as part of minstrel routines, which were, at the time, among America’s most popular (and profitable) forms of entertainment. The horrific caricatures of Southern Black people in these shows ultimately introduced the banjo and its pastoral catalogue to a broader, working-class white audience, and evolved into what is known as “hillbilly music.”

Country is primarily characterized by two key factors: The first is an artist’s ability to successfully perform rural American “authenticity” (It doesn’t actually matter how legitimate their claim is; famously, Keith Urban is from Australia). On Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé references her country credibility constantly, repeatedly citing her Southern heritage in Alabama, Texas, and Louisiana and country imagery (horses, Western attire, cowboy hats, etc.). In spite of this, the Country Music Association remained unconvinced: the awards committee gave Cowboy Carter zero nominations.

The second factor is, most plainly put, whatever is on country radio. Perhaps more than any other musical genre, country has been molded by the invention of the stereo and, later, the creation of country-specific content—I personally have so many nostalgic childhood memories of listening to WCOL, Columbus, Ohio’s country radio station, and watching CMT’S Top 20 countdown. Radio in part became so influential in country because of farm radios during the Great Depression, which provided affordable (and reliable) solace and distraction for rural laborers. Country radio broadcasts and variety shows—like the Grand Ole Opry, the Johnny Cash Show, and Hee Haw—all further promoted and solidified which artists were deemed country. Dolly Parton got her start on one of these sorts of shows, as cohost of The Porter Wagoner Show, where she debuted “I Will Always Love You” as a farewell.

Country’s territoriality around credibility and radio-play bespeaks some of its deeper biases. New Yorker pop critic Kelefa Sanneh writes:

“Just as ‘R&B’ has historically referred to music made by and for Black people, ‘country’ has historically referred to music made by and for white people—indeed, over the years, this commitment to whiteness has often been an implicit theme in the music, and occasionally an explicit one. Not all white people, of course: the genre has often claimed to speak to, and for, a specific kind of white people. Some country songs make the genre seem like the voice of the respectable American mainstream; others make it seem like a rebellion against mainstream respectability; most great country singers have songs of both types. But all successful country singers realize that there is an identifiable and influential country music audience. And many of them acknowledge that country music is whatever those people want it to be.”

If country is through repeated performances and debates over its authenticity, which is wedded to whiteness and the working-class, Beyoncé’s intense repetition of those same aesthetics destabilizes the singularity of one “country”—by which I mean the musical genre and nation.

On the album, the “i”’s in Cowboy Carter are stylized as “II,” a reference to the project being “Act II” in Beyoncé’s projected trilogy (although, as fans know, 2022’S Renaissance was meant to be second, originally). The doubled “I”s work on multiple levels: Cowboy Carter, like performance, gains meaning through its repetition, through Beyoncé’s invocation and reappropriation of countless country-Americana symbols. Her strategy might be thought of alongside what playwright Suzan Lori-Parks calls “Rep & Rev,” a device Lori-Parks adapts from jazz music’s style of repetition and variation. In America, where “nothing really ends,” Beyoncé’s imaginative repetition intervenes in the national cycles that she critiques.

Knowles-Carter also follows in the tradition of her Blues foremothers—Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith, especially—in creating music that documents the complications of her own mobility across U.S. landscapes as a Black woman (If you’re interested in this history, I can’t recommend McGinley’s aforementioned Staging the Blues and Angela Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminisms enough!). Theorist Michel de Certeau once asserted that space is “practiced place,” meaning that our understandings of places are formed by the behaviors, stories, and choreographies that are rehearsed there. Thinking of country’s America as a “practiced place,” Knowles-Carter asks audiences to consider what narratives exactly are being practiced and how to open them up for a more capacious geography.

“II” also destabilizes the authorial “I,” or the idea of a singular creative genius. Beyoncé frames herself as in concert and collaboration with the great Black musicians who have come before her. Like her Renaissance concert, Cowboy Carter is highly citational and heavily researched. Even the tour’s full name (Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin' Circuit Tour) is indicative of this type of dramaturgical intentionality. As many of you probably know, the Chitlin’ Circuit refers to the network of venues that hosted Black musicians during Jim Crow-era segregation laws. These venues provided a harbor for Black artists and their audiences, drawing another map of the Jim Crow South, one defined by kinship instead of containment.

Beyoncé’s naming of her tour after the Chitlin’ Circuit honors those Black artists and community workers, while also speaking back to and educating the public on the segregation policies that controlled their livelihoods. We can think about Knowles-Carter’s Chitlin’ Circuit alongside her KNTRY Radio Station: She reclaims performance routes that lawmakers and genre-definers restricted—such as concert halls and country radio stations, respectively—to suggest that sound and space should never be policed. Like the Chitlin’ Circuit before her, Beyoncé creates an explicitly Black geography and, in doing so, enacts another America and that, for Black audience members, may pave a path for joy and reclamation in the afterlives of historic domination. Cowboy Carter closes with a loop: its final song, “AMEN,” returns to themes and lyrics of “AMERIICAN REQUIEM” to bury “those old ideas”—which does not mean forget them and the harm they’ve caused, but rather, finally, to tend a space where something freer can grow.

“I swear it’s déjà vu”

A little over halfway through the Cowboy Carter tour, Beyoncé goes old school: She performs sections of some of her greatest hits, including “Crazy In Love,” “Single Ladies,” “Love On Top,” “Irreplaceable,” and “If I Were A Boy.” This was one of the most emotional moments of the entire concert for me. Suddenly, I was taken back to my formative memories with these songs: singing “Crazy In Love” with my cousins in the car; watching Kurt Hummel “audition” for the role of kicker to “Single Ladies” with my Dad; Brenty and I walking to some house party at Miami and belting “Love On Top” with these random girlies through their window; crashing out in Brenty’s Nana’s basement listening to “If I Were A Boy” like ten times in a row because it was just “really speaking to me”…. All these memories came rushing back, along with the others of Lemonade and self-titled and all the memorable moments Beyoncé has gifted us. I was able to see, with perspective, not just her legacy as an artist, but my growth as a listener.

I wrote earlier that much of Cowboy Carter is about legacy: America’s legacy, country music’s legacy, and Beyoncé’s legacy among other great Black artists. But there is another measurement of legacy for musicians that I want to talk about briefly, one that has little to do with awards or clout, but rather concerns the music that lives on in their fans’ minds, in some of our most intimate recollections, the way we use our favorite singers’ songs to track our own changes over time.

While writing my dissertation, I looped my favorite records constantly (including Lemonade, obviously). One night I had this thought: Tracing a Fleetwood Mac vinyl gifted to me by my Dad, I imagined that the grooves of the vinyl were like the rings of a tree, representing hard-won time. That is the gift that the artists we love give us. What an honor it is to measure the years with Beyoncé.

One Nightstand:

• I’m still working my way through Martyr!, but I’m almost done. I’m looking for a quicker read to take with me to LA this coming week—any recs? On my TBR: Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz; An American Marriage by Tayari Jones; Days of Abandonment by my QUEEN Elena Ferrante (only book of hers I haven’t read yet, I’ve been saving it!); and Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood. If you’ve read any of this and think I should read them next lmk!

Prompt of the Week:

• What’s a song that you associate with a specific memory? Tell me all about where you were, what was going on, what it felt like, etc. Bonus points if the song is by Beyoncé!

You all sent me some amazingly thoughtful responses to last week’s prompt about a rom-com detail that’s lingered with you. Here are some of your responses:

• From Dan: “Your prompt got me thinking of details from My Big Fat Greek Wedding (hoping you've seen it). And the first detail that came to mind is the kiddy pool used to baptize Ian in the Greek Orthodox Church. Some semi word vomit thoughts: The unusualness of baptizing an adult leads to the need for a bigger pool than the traditional silver basin used for infants. Because of the family’s need to uphold the honor of a traditional full immersion baptism, they don't opt for something more practical like simply sprinkling Ian’s head with water. This all leads to the ridiculous contrast between the loftiness of religion/tradition as exemplified by the ornate Greek Orthodox Church of the scene’s setting, and the makeshift PVC kiddy pool in which this age-old tradition is being sanctified. Surely this ridiculous object can’t be sufficient to uphold the tradition and honor of the family? But ultimately, in comparison to a “dignified” baptism, the ridiculousness of the situation magnifies the commitment Ian is making to Toula and her family. Ian still being too large to comfortably fit into the kiddy pool symbolizes his willingness to squeeze himself into the new confines of the family. Ian being willing to do something others would find embarrassing shows that his carefree attitude is a particularly good pairing for the overbearing nature of Toula’s family, and that ultimately his love for Toula supersedes self consciousness.”

• From Ri: “I don’t have an answer from a movie but two things that have imprinted on me that came to mind that I would just love to share of small details that have stuck with me in life were my friends mom told me to use conditioner instead of shaving cream and I’ve never gone back. Also I always lift my legs when going over train tracks in a car cause my other friends mom who would drive us around a lot always did it and now I can’t stop… I know there’s gotta be some things from movies I’m thinking more of quotes that like me and my family always say that no one else would ever get lol.” The last comment made me think about how media becomes a secret language between us and our loved ones!

• From Vic: “There are so many iconic details but I think when Stanley Tucci says all right everyone gird your loins (in The Devils Wears Prada)… My other one was Eloise at Christmas time when she gives a gift to everyone she encounters but that feels like a big moment.”

• Soph’s mom, Joan, and I talked about Darcy’s iconic line in Pride and Prejudice (“You have bewitched me body and soul and I love, I love, I love you”) and his walk to Lizzy. We talked about how part of what makes this moment so impactful is that he chooses to walk when he could easily take a carriage or ride horseback—Lizzy famously loves to walk, so if it feels symbolic of him coming to her and meeting her on her terms.

• Lmk if I’m forgetting any of your responses!!

See ya next week! Planning to write about Lorde’s new album.

Love,

Jen

The rom-com is dead, or so it’s been said, a fresh obituary printed each time a new one hits the box office. Somewhat paradoxically, critics and studios frame these eulogies alongside claims of the genre’s resurrection, trapping romantic comedies in an ever-looping posture of return—is it just me, or does it seem like the rom-com is revived annually, like our own box-office Jesus?

In his excellent article for Post45, “The Rom-Com is Dead, Long Live the Rom-Com,” Sean Lambert argues that, although studios are still producing rom-coms, these movies understand themselves as “repeating a bygone cultural moment” through compulsive gestures to their recent past. Revivalist rom-coms angle for legitimacy through their citations of the 1990s-2000s golden era, invoking the nostalgic currency of Nora Ephron and the like, either explicitly within the film or in its marketing. “The rom-com as we know (and love) it is dead… So, why do contemporary films keep blatantly referencing them?” IndieWire’s Samantha Bergeson observes. “The referential rom-com, once viewed as clever and quirky, has become the standard for a current crop of new movies.”

The latest entry in this trend, Celine Song’s Materialists, both follows this formula and subverts it. A24 and Song heavily marketed Materialists as a rom-com; ahead of her film’s release, Song selected two romantic comedies that inspired Materialists—When Harry Met Sally… and You’ve Got Mail, of course—to be specially shown in theaters through a partnership with Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. In promotional images for the film, Dakota Johnson poses between her co-stars, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal, who function as two (extremely) handsome male bookends in button-downs; Johnson is clad in all-white, silky and elegant in her corset blouse and floor-length skirt, like a contemporary Anthropologie bride. “She’s got 3 weeks left choose,” the photo’s Instagram caption entices, capitalizing on the well-worn trope of the love triangle.

Materialists, however, isn’t really a rom-com so much as a set of ideas. While the main plot orbits around Dakota Johnson’s character, Lucy, and her two contrasting suitors—a prince (Pedro Pascal’s Harry), whose refined tastes fit Lucy’s economic aspirations, and a pauper (Chris Evans’s John), a struggling actor with whom Lucy has history—Materialists’ romantic narrative is not nearly as compelling as its core questions. The film implores its audiences: How do you assess personal and prospective worth in a materialistic culture? How vital are shared financial and aesthetic values for romantic relationships? What’s the line between knowing what you want and turning partners into products? Does optimizing yourself for capitalist gain always result in losing yourself—and if so, what are the alternatives if you desire an economically “comfortable” life?

The film’s marketing fake-out, whether intentionally or not, mirrors one of the film’s conceits: Something or someone may check certain boxes on paper (for a genre, an ideal mate, etc.), but, in practice, things are a lot messier.

Materialists’ decidedly mixed reception echoes early conversations Lucy, a professional matchmaker, has with her clients. In an opening montage, a series of men and women are outraged when their high expectations don’t match with the reality of the dates Lucy offers them: Their romantic prospects are not quite as tall, or wealthy, or young, as desired or advertised. Lucy’s clients are perturbed when the experiences they are given don’t readily map with the ones in their heads—albeit in a different context, I found myself feeling similarly, as I sat in my theatre’s recliner at 8p with still-damp hair and cold French fries. I longed to be moved, to be reaffirmed of the human capacity for complex transformation, as I was in Song’s debut Past Lives. I yearned for a beautifully-made romantic comedy, one that struck me with its optimism and candor in equal parts. Instead, I found myself wondering: Can rom-coms still deliver convincing happy endings in an era where personal worth is so deeply tied to capitalist success? And, have we, as audience members, become too jaded to believe in romance’s idealism?

Materialist Girls? Work, Love, and Self-Actualization in the Contemporary Rom-Com

“A romance is always trying to make a persuasive case,” TikTok user @baskinsuns reflects. All romantic comedies should argue “why these people belong together; why they didn’t meet each other or belong together before; why they belong together now and in this moment; and why they belong together in the ever after,” she suggests, concluding that “the lack of persuasive storytelling on a micro-intimate level weakens [Materialists] as a whole.”

It's true that Materialists never really persuades or coheres. The film could have more convincingly sold its central romance through a flashback scene establishing John and Lucy’s compatibility beyond their history and through deeper characterization of Lucy herself—we never see inside her apartment, learn about her hobbies, or meet her friends! But, rather than picking apart Materialists’ execution, what I’m more interested in—and what you don’t need to have seen the film to discuss, so keep reading!—is why audiences broadly aren’t buying into a romance movie that, ultimately, encourages us to opt out of the economics of dating in favor of true love’s “lifetime guarantee.” I think there’s more going on here than flawed storytelling: Materialists’ aim and audience’s reception instead suggest a more foundational issue for contemporary romances—that of work and love, and the growing impossibility of finding a balance between the two.

First, it might be helpful to reflect on what makes a romantic comedy great—in other words, how do we know it has persuaded us? Anyone who has taken Theatre History 101 will tell you that dramas end in death and comedies in marriage—Shakespearean comedies, for example, nearly always ended in not just one, but several couples’ marriages as a means to comic closure (There are three official couples by the end of 10 Things I Hate About You!). Successful (romantic) comedies extend marriage to internal transformation, so our protagonists wed not just the right love interest, but disparate aspects of themselves.

We can trace this back to the classic “marriage plot,” a narrative structure that is foremostly associated with and modeled by 18^th and 19^th-century “middle class” novels by English women writers, including Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and George Eliot (the latter being Mary Ann Evans’s pen name). As women limited by a society where advantageous marriage was their only path to security, Austen and her cohort’s protagonists struggled to level their financial, gendered, and familial duties with their desires for adventure, mobility, and romantic freedom. Contemporary romantic comedies, especially those during the 90s-early aughts “golden era,” translated this fundamental conflict—between obligation and actualization—into the single girl’s quest for meaningful work and transformative romantic love. Returning to Lambert’s Post45 article, he cites media scholar Betty Kaklamanidou who argues that the prototypical rom-com organizes itself through the “paradigm” of balancing not just male and female relationships, but “marriage and work.”

This adaptable and age-old principle is likely why so many popular rom-coms feature women in journalism or other creative professions: Our heroine finding her voice professionally dovetails neatly, if unsubtly, with her finding her voice romantically. Some of the most compelling and beloved rom-coms challenge the symmetry of the work-love bind to the point of sidelining their romantic plots entirely: For example, in The Devil Wears Prada, the primary and meatiest conflicts arise between plucky Andie Sachs (Anne Hathaway) and her boss, the ever-iconic Miranda Priestley (Meryl Streep); and, in Legally Blonde, the grand gesture that rescues Elle Woods from despair arrives not from a love interest, but from her female professor, who, in a scene that never fails to give me chills, encourages Elle to push past Callahan’s (Victor Garber) predatory advances by saying, “If you're going to let one stupid prick ruin your life, you're not the girl I thought you were.” (The standard categorization of these films also begs the question: Are stereotypically “girly” movies unjustly subsumed into the “rom-com” genre solely due to their intended female audience?). More recently, Emily Henry’s wildly successful romance novels exercise the career-change-plus-love-equals-satisfaction equation by featuring narrators who are nearly always writers—the women of Henry’s books breakthrough creatively when they find themselves in new stories romantically. Like Andie Sachs before them, they toss their corporate cell-phones into the proverbial water fountain and run off into the sunset, a pen of their own in hand.

If contemporary romantic comedies are honed from our protagonists’ pursuits to self-actualize professionally and romantically, this partially explains the genre’s state of emergency, its string of flailing revivals. Amidst a brutal recession, autonomy-limiting legislation, a loneliness epidemic, and a dating scene that most of the time feels more like playing Candy Crush, to quote a friend, than genuinely connecting with a potential mate, it’s no wonder that young single people are struggling to connect with a genre predicated on protagonists’ ability to liberate themselves through love. As audiences, what do we do with the romantic comedy’s promise of enduring passion, in our careers and love lives, in an era when both endeavors feel so fragile—when not only equilibrium, but plain security in either seem insurmountable?

Maybe I’m projecting here: I’m single and spent the past six years devoting myself to academia, an increasingly unstable source of employment (awesome <3). But I don’t think it’s just me. Across varying fields, my friends share my frustrations about the job market; they feel increasing ambivalence about climbing unsteady corporate ladders and exploitative institutional hierarchies in a climate where employers care less and less about their workers, where the general feeling is one of dwindling reciprocity and narrowing options. I’ve watched myself and countless friends invest time, energy, and money in pursuit of more rewarding careers—be that through higher education, loyalty to particular companies, infinite job applications, or “personal branding”—for little to nothing in return. As I texted a dear friend recently, “it’s crazy to be grinding and get to the next phase of your career and realize things actually still feel so tenuous and unsatisfying.” I thought, again, of a common sentiment among my social circles, one ardently shared by Lucy at the beginning of Materialists: “I guess I should just marry rich after all.”

This brings me back to Materialists (spoiler warning). When we first meet Lucy, she is in a perpetual state of calculation: Her job is to assess the material value of prospective clients in split-seconds as she passes them on the street. We watch as she spends the majority of her courtship with Pascal’s Harry tallying up how much he’s “investing” in her when he picks up the trendy restaurant’s check and brings her a velvety bouquet of red roses. Lucy’s choice to make “a really irresponsible financial decision” and get back together with John at the end of the film should affect us: Our girl has gone from the queen of the calculator to chucking it out the window, like the phone-throwing ex-girlbosses before her. So, why doesn’t her ending land? Why have so many viewers lamented that Materialists is “broke boyfriend propaganda”? The answer, perhaps, is that we aren’t given enough to believe her transformation in a time when making professional and personal leaps of faith have higher stakes than ever.

Lucy is what Jia Tolentino might call an “always optimizing” woman, or “an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons of the marketplace.” She is “equally interested in whatever the market offers her—in the tools that will allow her to look more appealing, to be even more endlessly presentable, to wring as much value out of per particular position as she can.” We see Lucy “optimize” herself through plastic surgery, $400 silk blouses, her glossy corporate job, and her transparent desire to marry rich.

Lucy’s crisis of faith arrives not through the market’s failure of her directly, but when her favorite client, Sophie, is sexually assaulted on a date that Lucy set her up on. Part of me really appreciates Celine Song’s inclusion of this plotline—if Materialists is an attempt to stage a conversation about romance, value, and risk, occluding sexual violence from that discussion represents a failure to foreground what is perhaps the primary concern for most people who date men. Rape is always on my mind when I’m preparing for a first date, in particular, and, when it comes to new sexual relationships, my fear of an encounter turning dangerous is never far away. That being said, I have serious qualms about a side character’s assault being used as a plot device for the protagonist’s personal transformation (even while I believe the film handled Sophie’s experience, for the most part, thoughtfully). Albeit clunkily rendered, Sophie’s assault represents one far end of commodity culture, in which men view women as objects that they are entitled to, who cannot resist, who exist solely for their convenient pleasure. One of the eeriest scenes in Materialists comes when the man who assaulted Sophie tells Lucy that although he doesn’t see his relationship with Sophie as a serious thing, he is definitely down to see her again; Lucy cheers, the match signifying a business deal for her, unaware of what this man has actually done. The disconnect between the man’s nonchalance about his night with Sophie, Lucy’s celebration, and our eventual realization of Sophie’s trauma underscores—and, at least for me, never really resolves—that concerns about basic security in dating are not contained to the financial realm. They are deadly serious. In their last scene together, Lucy reassures Sophie that “her soulmate is still out there.” It’s meant to be a moving scene, but I felt hollow. When romantic comedy collides with societal reality, how does one choose to hope? When I calculate the risk factors, the rom-com’s ending seems not just out of reach, but miraculous.

Returning to Materialists’ Austenian predecessors, author Adelle Waldman wisely writes that “the idea that [marriage plot novels], like fairy tales, depend so heavily on those happy marriages puts too little stock in what comes before.” Waldman locates the real power in marriage plots—and, I would argue, our best contemporary romantic comedies—as lying within the hard-won growth of its primary characters. The truth is, we want to see our heroes humbled by love: It's why there will always be remakes of Pride and Prejudice, why we return to Harry Burns’s New Year’s Eve monologue, again and again. Perhaps it’s not so much rom-coms’ happy endings that we crave, but rather, compelling proof that profound personal change—and the bravery and secure attachment it takes to pursue it—is possible. That type of thing is much harder—but all the more necessary—to depict on-screen.

One Nightstand:

- Still making my way through Martyr! Loving it, but also… it’s a lot right now.

- Speaking of Tolentino, I loved her essay in the New Yorker this week about Gen Z’s presumed abstinence. Her penultimate paragraph in particular hits:

- Lorde’s new album is everything—planning to write about it next Friday’s mini-review!

Next week’s topic: Cowboy Carter (seeing Beyoncé TODAY!).

Prompt of the Week:

- Thanks to those of you who responded to last week’s prompt! Favorite album covers included Lorde’s Melodrama and Aly & AJ’s Insomniatic, which, AGREED.

This week’s prompt:

- What’s a tiny movie detail that deeply imprinted on you? Mine is Brittany Murphy turning a lampshade into a hair accessory in Uptown Girls. Bright idea, indeed.

Much love,

Jen

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Some Words of Welcome

(Feel free to to skip down to “What do pop stars owe us?” if you’re here for the Sabrina Carpenter essay! I swear I’ll have a less lengthy preamble going forward lol).

As I mentioned on Instagram, starting this blog comes from a deep desire to maintain a consistent writing practice in the now-absence of the academic structure that has grounded me for the past six years (… ok, scary).

Writing is how I make sense of the world: so is reading, writing’s sister, and conversation, her close-in-age cousin. I know that statement is far from unique, that it swerves into cliché, and still, I find it worth saying because it is so true. If so many of us find refuge in language and story, then our not-so-specialness is a place of potential. Even as I’ve found that I can write my way through most things—that creating language is a salve of perspective—I am even more compelled by what I cannot put into words, or neat narrative, for all my trying. How does that failure encourage other practices of navigation?

I am, most of all, invested in how writing, reading, and conversation can all be modes of listening; how they reach us in ways that move beyond their containers. In a quote that I keep pinned above my desk, Toni Morrison offers:

“Writing and reading are not all that distinct for a writer. Both exercises require being alert and ready for unaccountable beauty, for the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer’s imagination, for the world that imagination evokes. Both require being mindful of the places where imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gates, pollutes its vision. Writing and reading mean being aware of the writer’s notions of risk and safety, the serene achievement of, or sweaty fight for, meaning and response-ability.” – Morrison, 1992

Under Morrison’s rubric of “response-ability” (a way of life, really), how do writing and reading exceed the page? The “exercises” she describes are not limited to books and documents: the alertness, mindfulness, and awareness that she champions are methods of tuning in, ones that we each might find in our own serene and sweaty searches for meaning. Diving into the pages of a book, finding the grooves of our creativity’s meditation, and stepping into deep portals of conversation: these are journeys grounded in narrative meaning that aren’t fixated on an answer, but linger instead in the process of listening itself. How can I (we?) create more space for that?

At the Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop that I attended last week, Claire Dederer brilliantly proposed one role for writers. Paraphrasing Lisa Jones, she shared that storytellers “build a structure out of our discomfort in the world so that others might take comfort there.” Wow. I feel discomfort, at a loss, a lot of the time. Maybe you do, too. Crafting a shelter out of that discomfort is an ambitious goal for a weekly newsletter, and I definitely won’t always hit it. Some weeks will not be so noble, will focus instead on less explicitly substantive affairs. I hope, no matter what, to build a guest-house for your curiosity, for your frustration—for your need for story and perspective, too.

How this newsletter will work

Onto business: If you know me well, you know I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a Substack… forever. You’ve probably heard me brainstorm many iterations of its title over countless cross-country phone calls and FaceTimes. So, why “active listener”? Most simply, because I am one. Besides my eyeliner, it might be my most defining feature, the one people are most likely to reference when describing me to strangers. Anyone who’s been in class with me can testify to my steady chorus of oohs and mhms. While I know some find kinship in this quality (shoutout <3), I know others are perturbed by it: it’s put me on the receiving end of undesired cold calls and, true story, I recently got shushed for listening too hard at a women’s support group meeting. I can’t turn my mms off, though, and tbh, I wouldn’t want to. As is hopefully clear by now, I believe that active listening is a mark of engagement in the world. We should all ache for people’s stories, and we should approach the fundamental limitations of our empathy for them with rigor and generosity. In other words: I really mean them, each belligerent vocalization.

I also love music. Duh. “Active listener” is a play-on what is sure to be a recurring well of thematic inspiration here: how culture, performance, and sound shape us. I’ll be listening (actively, lol) to other things, too—places I travel, books I read, conversations I love. But the multiple ways we listen to popular music and performance especially will be a throughline.

All that being said, this is how this newsletter will work: I’ll share an essay every Sunday, along with two other recurring segments: 1.) “One Nightstand,” aka a list of what I’m reading, things on my nightstand, etc. and 2.) “Prompt of the Week,” a conversation-starter directed at you all (lmao classic) where I’ll share your responses from the previous week, too. I’m also planning to share short album and book reviews every other Friday: For these I am gonna constrain myself to 750 words!

My invocation of pop music brings us to today’s topic :) A less serious, but still significant one: Let’s dip into the discourse….

What do pop stars owe us?

One album cover, one trillion hot takes. Last week, Sabrina Carpenter unveiled the artwork for her upcoming album, Man’s Best Friend, and the internet promptly swarmed with opinions. Some critics cast Carpenter as the death-knell of contemporary women’s representation, an emblem of conservativism and/or choice feminism at its finest; meanwhile, several millennials reminded the Internet that, culturally, we’ve witnessed so much worse. A handful of defenders argued that the widespread outrage was the result of a “depressingly puritanical society,” while others derided Carpenter’s denouncers for not getting her sense of humor. Perhaps what these varied insights reveal, above all, is that social media is a springboard, not a primary source, for nuanced discussion.

I’m trying to recall my first reaction to Carpenter’s cover last week: I was in Denver for the aforementioned writing conference, and I’d just returned to my hotel room, full of hunger, sweat, and ideas. Somewhere between obliterating a Cliff bar with concerning velocity and changing into my giant Guinness t-shirt, I reconnected with my phone: In my world, this means locking into some Duolingo; catching up with my Vanderpump Rules and besties group chats; and refreshing Insta, where my accounts of interest conveniently float up to the top of my feed with deceptive ease. I opened the app and there Sabrina was, on all stilettoed-fours in a black mini-dress, pawing at an anonymous and out-of-focus suited figure as he yanked a handful of her golden hair. Crawling in front of a white showroom curtain in full-glam, Carpenter seemed to glance right at us as if she’d been caught and, now, dared a response.

I wasn’t surprised at Sabrina’s Man’s Best Friend cover, nor was I appalled or entirely enthusiastic. If anything, my reaction was a mix of intrigue and wariness at the discourse I was sure would arise from it.

Carpenter is an astute and charismatic performer. As such, I immediately understood Man’s Best Friend’s cover to be an artistic and economic decision, one aligned with the highly theatrical and hyper-feminine brand that Sabrina’s has been cultivating in caffeinated earnest post-“Espresso.” Her recent album artwork harnesses the same bawdy-cute, get-them-talking PR strategy that’s worked overtime for her in the past (See: the “Feather” Catholic-church-set music video controversy; “Nonsense” out-uendos; and “Have you ever tried this one?” portion of her recent global tour, etc.). That Carpenter is able to rely on her sexuality and self-expression to repeatedly engineer viral moments is indicative of her savviness as businesswoman; her multipronged, but especially racial, privilege; and the fact that pop music has ample room for man-hating that still centers… well, men. In contrast to Man’s Best Friend’s first single (the catchy, if redundant, “Manchild”), the album cover evokes the hetero-pessimism at the heart of Carpenter’s music not by casting men as embarrassing motherfuckers or dull tools, but rather through implying that they treat women like dogs, or as their “bitches.” Through her canine posture, Sabrina intimates that she’s eager to play the puppy part at the expense of her own dignity, or, conversely, that she’s game to perform such humiliation in order to lamp-shade its ridiculousness.

Whose “visual pleasure” is it, anyway?

So, is Carpenter catering to the “male gaze” or subverting it? Is she Man’s Best Friend’s object, author, or actor? Supporters of the album cover insist that Carpenter is “for the girls and the gays,” which may be true, but her intended audience doesn’t neuter the broader context in which she’s performing.

A short n’ sweet film theory lesson: The “male gaze” is not a catch-all term that describes any oversexed or ultra-submissive depiction of a young woman; rather, it is a concept that film theorist Laura Mulvey popularized in 1973 in her Screen journal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Since “Visual Pleasure”’s publication, Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze has become citation de riguer for students of feminist media, and several important scholars, including bell hooks (!!) (See: “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators”), have expanded and complicated Mulvey’s ideas, especially to more thoroughly address race.

^ Helpful basic overview of Mulvey’s essay. Also, apologies to any film studies people reading this, I know it’s giving 101 lol.

In her article, Mulvey draws from psychoanalysis to suggest that mainstream cinema “coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.” She demonstrates how the voyeuristic aspects of film rely on predation and fetishization of the female body—think, fragmentation, spectacle, and lingering close-ups—while simultaneously situating male protagonists as in control of what audiences see.

It’s interesting here to note the past three of Carpenter’s album covers all feature her in the sort of classically voyeuristic postures that Mulvey critiques. In both emails I can’t send (underrated btw) and Short n’ Sweet, Carpenter glances over her bare shoulder, surprised, yet disarmed. Man’s Best Friend ups the ante by finding her in a more provocative posture; using an Indie-sleaze color gradation that mimics a disposable camera’s sudden flash, Carpenter is arrested in an act of submission and possible degradation. The accompanying figure grabs her hair as his leash, which—even if intended as commentary or kink—remains a rendering of a woman’s domination.

It's not just Sabrina that taps into voyeurism: Ariana Grande’s first two covers (Yours Truly and My Everything) spotlight an Ari in repose; she’s explicitly on display, and per all those “wake tf up” memes, her eyes are closed, meaning the viewer sees more than she does. Madonna, who has been constantly invoked in relation to Man’s Best Friend, adopts both recline and eyes-shut ecstasy on Like a Virgin and True Blue’s artwork, respectively. Even on Addison, Rae gazes past her shoulder through gauze, as if beckoning viewers to step into her hazy-rainbow realm (although, I’d argue the filmy, gossamer quality of Addison does important work situate the album as an into-the-rabbit-hole exploration, rather than a drawing of the curtain).

It’s worth saying that, in all of these cases, these albums came at transitional times in their artists’ careers, where these women were justifiably eager to be taken more seriously. Their postures, whether intentionally or not, called upon filmic language to suggest their newfound maturity, simultaneously inviting audiences in and holding them at a distance. Here, the question of control persists: are these young artists speaking back to the probing camera lens that has defined women’s media representation as a way of claiming their authority over it? Do they simply like how they look in the images? How much authority do young female artists even have over their own photos, especially if they are meant to be sold widely?

Returning to Mulvey, what she’s saying in a very basic sense is that, in mainstream film, women are the spectacles, or ornaments, that provoke male heroes into action. Or, to quote John Berger, “Men act, women appear.” Film is pleasurable to spectators, Mulvey ascertains, because while they’re under its spell, they can both admire the beautiful “object” and inhabit the enviable role of protagonist.

The issue with this, of course, is that there is no singular and universal audience. Assuming uniform modes of spectatorship is dangerous and erases difference. For her part, Mulvey suggests that the pleasure derived from the “male gaze” ought to be attacked and destroyed in order to “make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film.” Note that Mulvey’s order here is fundamentally at odds with what is supposed to be every pop stars’ main goal—commercial success.

In the case of Carpenter, I agree with many creators’ cogent critiques that a woman doing “whatever she wants”—be it in jest, contempt, or ambivalence—is not inherently feminist and, through its centering of individualism over structural change, is definitely not radical. But is that radicality really a fair expectation? Great pop music is uniquely equipped to tap into our big, core emotions; in that way, it can be almost democratic. It’s also a productive space in which artists can wrestle with the societal markets their work must negotiate. For all its candor and clever negotiation, however, pop can’t ever really escape its commercial context: Tellingly, Carpenter celebrated “Manchild”’s #1 Hot 100 debut on Instagram a few days after sharing the Man’s Best Friend album cover. The posts now sit in squares, side-by-side.

But then again, shouldn’t Sabrina be able to ironically (or even sincerely!) act out her personal desires, to testify to her complicated relationships with men in her own music? Can’t a girl sing about how she wants her man to make her “Juno,” while also claiming her frustration and disappointment of what that negotiation looks like in practice? Let her bet on bed chem and bitch and moan, for god’s sake! It’s Sabrina’s art and, for better or for worse, there are plenty of people (myself included) who resonate with it.

The real question isn’t whether we should be “pro” or “con” Carpenter’s controversial cover. It’s this: How do we, as audience members and consumers, navigate the assumption that popular female artists might represent the paragon of feminism when, in reality, pop music is definitionally a capitalist enterprise? Carpenter and her team are producers of a product—aka the image of Sabrina herself. Our time might be better spent discussing why our national culture is so ready to consume, critique, and catapult an image of a woman’s abasement, whether its satirical or not, rather than picking apart the editorial choices and personal predilections of the latest massively successful female pop artist.

I love Sabrina; I love her theatre-kid commitment to physical comedy and dramatics, and I love the humor and joy her music brings me— that playful eyeroll that is sometimes cathartic, sometimes silly, but is always refreshing and fun. I love that, as Brenty and Ri mentioned in our discussion of this album cover, she’s letting us all have our conversation about Man’s Best Friend even though she could easily hop in at any time to outline her exact intentions. That’s the sign of someone who’s been in the business for a long time. It’s also indicative of someone who knows that audiences love and then hate and then love female artists over and over again.

To summarize, Carpenter is performing a part, one that pulls from a host of blonde bombshell and pop icon references, in order to solidify a tried-and-true product that is both familiar and original. Following her mass success, us fans have watched Sabrina fine-tune and embellish the most cartoonish characteristics of this role, the aspects that have drawn her the most attention and, yes, the highest sales. Carpenter’s retooling her reproducible image, one that has certainly reached acclaim both because of her pure talent and her status as a young, white, hyper-feminine celebrity whose performed sexuality and small stature do not challenge, in fact, some would argue they maintain, the white patriarchal order. Sabrina isn’t responsible for those systems by any means, but she is a part of them and negotiates them from her particular vantage point. You can love Sabrina and also understand that pop stars are often pulse-checks into the national psyche: Carpenter’s character fantasizes about domesticity, is loyal to men to a fault, and is sure to amplify her blondness, tininess, and horniness—she’s also witty, eternally unsatisfied, and self-critical. I’m not asking what that all says about her: what does it say about us?

It’s also not lost on me that myself and others have spilled so much ink and spent so much time analyzing what ultimately amounts to… how one woman chose to make and market her art. And we don’t even have the context of the album yet! We have an unremarkable single and a fucking awesome music video. I can’t think of a recent time where there’s been such agony over a white male’s album artwork.

The awesome music video in question.

One Nightstand

Side note: This was originally this blog’s title until I realized that Bustle was running a segment with the same title and concept, but with… famous people <3

Here I’ll share what books etc. are on my nightstand this week. From my home to yours….

- I know there are a lot more important things going on in the world than debates about a pop artist’s album cover. I hope this essay has been able to provoke a different, still significant (if much lower stakes), corner of your critical mind as you process recent news, mobilize however makes sense for you, and continue to share resources. I posted Lorgia García-Peña’s article, “Immigrant Rights Are Human Rights,” on Insta last week, which so powerfully summarizes how empires maintain borders through colonial systems of racialization and how globalized languages of protest are methods for interrogating that which is made to appear “natural.” I’ve uploaded the article here.

- I’ve also been reading the poetry of Solmaz Sharif, who I was fortunate to see read at Lighthouse. One of her poems I’ve been returning to: "He, Too" by Solmaz Sharif.

- I also started Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! earlier this week: Its relevancy is striking, and I’m in awe of Akbar’s brilliance. Maryr! Follows Cyrus Shams on his quest to give his “inheritance of violence and loss” meaning: in 1988, shortly after Cyrus’s birth, a U.S. navy warship mistakenly shot down a commercial Iranian plane, killing 290 people (including Cyrus’s mother). This is a real event that happened, for which America never acknowledged wrongdoing or apologized. That year, during his presidential campaign, George H. W. Bush said: “I don’t care what the facts are… I’m not an apologize for America kind of guy.”

- I finished Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma earlier this week and loved it. Dederer captures eloquently the discernment we, as engaged audience members, must do when it comes to art. Though the nexus of Monsters is, based on Dederer’s viral (and also excellent) Paris Review essay, “What do we do with the art of monstrous men?”, her text traverses across the terrains of art, morality, fandom, culpability, consumerism, hate, love, and hurt in a bold way that exceeds its initial, important frame. It’s worth noting, also, that Dederer models a way of creating that begins with men’s acts of violence and then erupts into something else, something deeper, which no longer holds men and their monstrosity at its center.

- Alternating mugs of Elderberry Immunity/Stress and Chamomile Bedtime tea.

Prompt of the week

What’s an album cover you really love—one that you feel totally embodies, even enhances, the world the artist is creating through their music? And what’s one that you think really detracts from the music aka doesn’t do it justice? Alternatively: If you were to design an album cover for this era of your life, what would it look like?? Will share your responses next week! <3

Thanks for making it this far. I’d say my future posts will probably be shorter, but knowing me…

Much love,

Jen

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