“The White Lotus” is one of those shows that sticks with you.

Mike White’s masterful series, which follows a new group of wealthy Americans (and locals) each season as they travel to a different White Lotus hotel, wrapped its second season in mid-December, but we’ve both been thinking about it ever since. So by popular demand, we finally got our act together to podcast about it.

White loves a Big Juicy Theme, and this season it was sex, specifically of the transactional variety. As Jen Chaney put it in her Vulture review,  “Season one established that practically every relationship is transactional, and season two goes a step further by suggesting that satisfaction can only be achieved when one understands that essential truth.”

In this week’s episode, we get into the power of transactional sex, what it takes to sustain a longterm sexual partnership, Tanya’s dramatic exit, and the most gorgeous (Valentina’s suits, Daphne’s dresses, and all of Harper’s wardrobe) and chaotic (cough, Portia, cough) fashion moments. Hope you enjoy! xo

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We’ve been watching…

The new all-singles season of “The Circle.” I took a break on this Netflix reality show for the last few seasons, but I came back to it in the new year and I find this season totally delightful. They made every player on this season play as a single, and it really creates some great and cringe-worthy opportunities for text-based flirting / mayhem. -Emma

“I Hate Suzie Too,” a British show starring Billie Pieper as a somewhat washed-up actor — still working, but seemingly with her glory days in the rearview mirror — who is about to score a huge new role when hackers obtain sexual photos of her and leak them. Her marriage and career immediately veer into freefall as she desperately tries to manage the fallout. It can be a bit woozy to watch, with camera and sound effects layered onto panicky moments to induce the same wobbly, unsteady feelings in the audience, so I’m taking it in smaller doses. Pieper is outstanding as Suzie, a highly strung ball of energy forever trying to find the right balance between gregarious fun and self-destructive intensity. -Claire

We’ve been reading…

Jana Casale’s novel, “How To Fall Out Of Love Madly.” It follows three women in their early 30s, all struggling to navigate romantic relationships and the failures of the men they have put their trust in, but all in different ways. The writing is fun and the perspectives are sharp. The perfect book to get me back into the swing of reading novels. -Emma

P.G. Wodehouse’s “The Inimitable Jeeves”! Wodehouse and Agatha Christie were my gateway-to-adulthood authors, the writers of non-children’s books who eased my transition to grownup literature. When we were at my family’s home for Christmas, I spied a whole shelf of their books on my childhood bookcase, and idly found myself rereading some of them. It’s absolutely corking stuff, as Bertie might say; Wodehouse is a shining example of a writer who knows his groove and has found ingenious ways to reuse and refresh the same story template and tropes to equally hilarious effect each time. -Claire

We’ve been listening to…

The four-part “Shameless” series on the inner circle of NXIVM, hosted by Vanessa Grigoriadis, who does a lot of reflecting on the reporting she did on NXIVM back in 2017 after the first explosive NYTimes story was published. I just cannot seem to get enough cult content in my life. -Emma

So much nostalgic music. We were profoundly blessed that our toddler chilled out with his iPad and a bunch of Disney movies for the better part of our 12-hour drives to and from Indiana, which allowed me to put in my earbuds, eat candy, and zone out to all the corniest emo shit I used to love in high school: Jack’s Mannequin, Dashboard Confessional, The Starting Line. Jimmy Eat World still slaps, and so do sour gummy worms. -Claire

We’ve been buying…

A high-waisted faux leather skirt designed by an influencer whose style content I genuinely love. I have been trying to focus my clothing purchases on versatile pieces that can be worn with multiple other pieces I already own and this fits the bill. -Emma

I can’t believe I’ve become this person, but: the Dyson Supersonic hairdryer. Winter has made my hair so limp and sad, and nothing was helping, so when I saw a rare post-Christmas discount on the fuschia dryer at Best Buy, I bought a hairdryer that cost about three times as much as I ever believed I’d spend on a grooming appliance.

And it was worth it. I’m so sorry to report this. I wish it weren’t true. For years I’ve used a pro Babyliss dryer with a diffuser for my wavy-curly hair, and I chose to believe that a pricier dryer would not be meaningfully better. But the results were always pretty frizzy, as the excess airflow from the diffuser whipped my flyaways around my head like gale-force winds, and the heat damage to my hair added up. With the Dyson diffuser (on low heat and speed), I get dry, bouncy, almost glossy curls in 25 minutes — even better than the results I get from air-drying on a beautiful summer day. A thousand apologies for this recommendation. (I’ve since read that the cheaper Shark knockoff is also a curly girl favorite.) -Claire

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