Hello lovely subscribers! Welcome to another Monday recap podcast to tide us all over before BIP airs on Tuesday.

Today, we’re diving into the week 2 drop of “The Circle.” And this is the week that things really start to get interesting. Alliances are forming! Twists are coming out of nowhere! Catfishes are being hunted! Sexy selfies are being sent from bed! Weirdly culturally appropriative costumes are being delivered to the doors of the players!

There’s a whole lot to unpack. Hope you enjoy! xo

Share

We’ve been watching…

“Motel Makeover,” a delightful Netflix mini-series about two women, April Brown and Sarah Sklash, who renovate a motel (the title is fairly descriptive!) in Sauble Beach, Ontario during 2020. (Spoiler alert: Covid fucks some shit up.) -Emma

I just started “Only Murders in the Building,” Hulu’s murder mystery comedy starring Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez (who is giving me fall fashion goddess vibes throughout). The three of them play tenants of a big NYC apartment building who are obsessed with true crime podcasts and decide to make their own about a murder in their building. So far, it’s fairly amusing — worth watching especially if you’re familiar with the true crime pod genre, since it comes in for some well-deserved skewering. -Claire

We’ve been reading…

Our old friend Maddie Crum’s lovely and rigorous review of “Inseparable,” a never-before-published novella by Simone de Beauvoir, which delves into the way feminism can be used as a marketing ploy, the various motivations a writer might have for keeping certain work from a public readership, and de Beauvoir’s 1967 (published) novella “The Age of Discretion,” which I now desperately want to read.

Also, Patrick Nathan’s “Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist,” a terrifying look at how the stream of decontextualized images that we now constantly consume undermine our sense of collective understanding and ability to process the threats to freedom and justice that surround us. I am not alone in often reaching for tired complaints about the hell of social media, or cable news, without reaching any useful insights about why they strike me as hellish. This book puts some of those pieces together. -Claire

We’ve been listening to…

I cannot get enough of scammer stories. So when I learned that journalist and author of Bad Blood John Carreyrou was releasing a new podcast, “Bad Blood: The Final Chapter,” during Elizabeth Holmes’ trial, I was legally obligated to subscribe. (And yes, I did sign up on Apple so I could get the bonus content too.) -Emma

So, remember what I was saying before about true crime podcasts and how much they deserve to be skewered? Yeah, I’m still listening to them anyway. I recently started “Suspect,” a podcast about an unsolved murder during a Halloween party years ago, and the man who was wrongly convicted of the crime. I appreciate that the show looks closely at how the police investigation came to focus on a Black party guest instead of other prime suspects, closely examining the revealing and inconsistent statements made by the cops about the suspect, without relegating the murder victim to a sidebar. -Claire

This searing essay in The Washington Post from Dr. Alan Braid, a doctor and abortion care provider, who wrote about his civil disobedience in the face of Texas’ near-total abortion ban. The op-ed is brave and powerful and is basically daring someone to sue him. -Emma

We’ve been buying…

Weddings are apparently back? Which means I need dresses to wear to fall weddings? I took advantage of Reformation’s big end-of-season sale, and got this one-shoulder number. -Emma

The first hints of fall weather threw me into a bit of a panic at the idea of another cold season indoors, cycling through the same handful of pilled, droopy sweatsuits that got me through Winter 2020-21. The result: I’m trying out one of Madewell’s MWL sets for the first time and trying to open my mind to wearing outside pants… inside. -Claire

Share Rich Text