Dearest gentle reader…

In the words of our dear gossip-monger Lady Whistledown, “Diamonds are not the only gems that sparkle.” On this season of “Bridgerton,” we are given an emerald, in the form of a no-longer-citrus-clad Penelope Featherington. The former wallflower is in full bloom, catching the eyes of both naturalist Lord Debling and her old friend Colin Bridgerton, newly returned from his travels around the continent.

Will these former friends become something more? And how will Lady Whistledown’s true identity complicate the whole affair? These are the main questions hovering over the third season of Netflix’s hit period rom-dramedy.

There’s a lot to love about “Bridgerton” season three: the friends-to-lovers trope, the escalating tension between Penelope and her former bestie Eloise (in some ways the true beating heart of the show), a relaunch for Francesca Bridgerton, the comic relief provided by the Featherington sisters, and some really hot sex scenes.

But not everything sparkles so brightly. The dialogue is (at times) wooden, the balls feel repetitive, and there are several storylines that seem more designed to fill space than further any real character development. (Also… why do Cressida Cowper’s costumes make her look like she arrived straight from The Capitol?)

In this Rich Text episode, we get into our full review of the season, including our thoughts on the central love story, the significance of Pen and Eloise’s friendship, potential future queer love stories for the Bridgertons, and more. We hope you enjoy!

If you liked reading this, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Patreon!

Give us feedback or suggest a topic for the pod • Subscribe • Request a free subscription

“Selling the O.C.” has always distinguished itself from its older, cooler sister “Selling Sunset” by being slightly worse in almost every respect: the fashion, the characters, the politics, the drama. In season 3, that continues. The “Love Island”-inspired, Shein-designed outfits, the flatly unpleasant people, the thinly veiled bigotries, and the warmed-over storylines make for an uninspiring season. Still worse, the biggest central stories now seem irrelevant, given how many key characters have left the show since this season filmed.

But “Selling the O.C.” does offer one thing “Selling Sunset” does not: sheer villain volume. Everyone who has briefly won our sympathy on this show immediately loses it (except perhaps Brandi, who has effectively sidelined herself from the drama this go-around). The most likable characters onscreen often turn out to have the most heinous politics, and even the more sympathetic figures often have pretty unpleasant vibes themselves. There’s not a Chrishell in this bunch, folks. It’s mean girls and asshole bros all the way down.

In this episode, we discuss the alarmingly flammable-looking fashion; the abysmal race, class and gender politics; the Alex Hall-Tyler Stanaland will-they-won’t-they flirtation that just won’t end; and the gay panic that appears to have blown up the cast. We hope you enjoy!

If you liked reading this, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Patreon!

Give us feedback or suggest a topic for the pod • Subscribe • Request a free subscription

Are we in the golden age of friend-group Bravo shows? After doing a major binge of established shows “Summer House,” “Vanderpump Rules,” and new addition “The Valley,” we think that answer is a resounding yes. So naturally, we had to get Gibson Johns of Gibsonoma back on the Rich Text pod to do a little state of the Bravo union.

All three of the aforementioned shows track the semi-glitzy, semi-depressing, utterly entertaining lives of 20, 30 and 40-somethings in Los Angeles and New York City. (“Summer House: Martha’s Vineyard” and “Southern Charm” do something similar in Massachusetts and Charleston.) And when you watch them all in quick succession, some themes emerge: men in perpetual arrested development, the dissolution of longterm romantic partnerships, and a meta-commentary on what living your early adult life on television does to the shape it ultimately takes.

“Vanderpump Rules” has a post-Scandoval hangover, but is muddling its way through this season before the cast gets a well-deserved pause in filming. And “Summer House” is having what is possibly its best season ever, mining not just the slow collapse of Lindsay Hubbard and Carl Radke’s engagement, but conflict between married couple Kyle Cooke and Amanda Batula, and a budding romance between Ciara Miller and newcomer West. (West, a 28-year-old, blonde, recently-laid-off journalist, is a truly unlikely new Bravo heartthrob.)

And then there’s “The Valley.”

We have to admit that when “The Valley” was first announced, we didn’t have high hopes. It was framed as a “VPR” spinoff that followed “a group of close friends as they trade bottle service in West Hollywood for baby bottles in the Valley all while they navigate bustling businesses, rocky relationships and feisty friendships.” But… did anyone really want Jax Taylor back on their screens?

And yet, seven episodes in, we are hooked. (Brian Moylan even wrote a whole mea culpa over on Vulture.) Kristen Doute is spreading chaos, a very pregnant newbie Janet is planting little gossip seeds all over Valley Village, and Jesse Lally is a bad enough partner that his bad vibes rival even Jax’s. What more could the dark corners of our reality-TV-loving hearts desire?

If you liked reading this, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Patreon!

Give us feedback or suggest a topic for the pod • Subscribe • Request a free subscription

Taylor Swift’s 11th original studio album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” was released last week into a world feverishly gripped by anticipation for a Taylor Swift album. Some were primed to adore her latest work, which Swifties broadly expected to be a thorough excavation of her relationship with her ex-partner of six years, actor Joe Alwyn; others were primed to mock and flame it. We, two rather casual Swift fans, were drawn in by the sheer intensity of the gathering discourse — not to mention our own anticipation of another album. And after almost a week of listening and relistening to the album, following the critical reactions to it, and stewing in the public debates raging about it, we decided we were ready to wade in.

But not without help! For this conversation, we’re joined by writer, critic, and Taylor Swift scholar B.D. McClay, (BDM ),who has written some of our favorite pieces of Swiftian criticism. You can find her work at outlets like The New Yorker, The Baffler, and Commonweal, as well as on her Substack, Notebook, which we highly recommend. Her Substack piece on “TTPD” is excellent, and helped us clarify our own reactions to the album:

There’s no doubt that “TTPD” is a huge amount of music to sift through — and that’s before accounting for the lore, the Easter eggs, the references, and how the entire work plays with and against her ubiquitous public presence and well established brand. At the moment this album came out, after months of being on top of the world, selling out massive shows for her international Eras tour and holding a nation rapt with her public romance with Super-Bowl-winning tight end Travis Kelce, Swift was overexposed and hovering at the precipice of an almost inevitable backlash. Then she announced “The Tortured Poets Department” by working it into a Grammy’s acceptance speech, a move widely perceived as crassly commercial. The name of the album and the promotional materials around it (including an odd library installation in Los Angeles featuring Spotify-branded, faux-aged papers with misspelled lyrics draped over typewriters) fed into a narrative that the album would be cringe, a long-form dark academia TikTok full of adolescent pretension. There was so much discourse about this album before it even dropped.

When it did drop, the reactions were far from uniformly laudatory. Many critics have noted that the album is overly long, unedited, a bit shapeless perhaps. The lyrics can veer into the goofy and embarrassing. The musical motifs seem to echo her recent past albums. There’s merit to a lot of the critiques. And yet… we found a great deal to love on the album as well. And the longer we sit with it, the more we relisten, the more we find irresistible hooks hidden away in the back halves of songs, glimpses of dry humor, and moments of profoundly lovely lyricism.

In this conversation, we tried to cover as much ground as we could in just a couple of hours, discussing our favorite songs, what we think about the angry and vulnerable Taylor who appears on this album, what stories and themes she’s exploring in it, whether it’s fair to read her newer works as emotionally stunted songs about boys and bullies, and why she keeps flooding us with so much new music.

“Taylor Swift Still Isn’t Your Friend,” B.D. McClay’s 2023 Slate essay about the controversy surrounding Taylor’s relationship with Matty Healy

“Taylor Swift Derangement Syndrome with B.D. McClay,” Know Your Enemy pod

"Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets' is written in blood," Ann Powers, NPR

“Come for the Torture, Stay for the Poetry: This Might Be Taylor Swift’s Most Personal Album Yet,” Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone

"Taylor Swift's Tortured Poetry," Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker

"The Tortured Poets Department / Anthology" review, Olivia Horne, Pitchfork

“The Performative Poets Department,” Craig Jenkins, Vulture

“The Real Reason Taylor Swift Dresses Like That,” Cathy Horyn, NYMag

“Is ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ Taylor Swift’s Most Controversial Album Ever?,” Every Single Album pod, The Ringer

“Taylor Swift seems sick of being everyone’s best friend,” Constance Grady, Vox

If you liked reading this, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Patreon!

Give us feedback or suggest a topic for the pod • Subscribe • Request a free subscription

It was sometime last year that it started to feel like Big Conversations about marriage and divorce were *everywhere.*

David Brooks was lecturing young people to “obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage” because marriage rates have been falling. Emily Gould was contemplating leaving her husband and then not over on The Cut. High-profile writers like Lyz Lenz, Leslie Jamison and Maggie Smith were all releasing memoir (or memoir-adjacent) books about their respective divorces. And then… there were the trad wives. The trad wives, who it felt like were following us around TikTok and Instagram, homesteading and baking in dresses and posting about the failures of feminism.

Even on reality television, it feels like there’s been a distinct uptick in storylines involving the dissolution of longterm relationships. On Bravo we’ve been watching a spate of splits and their aftermaths unfold: Ariana and Sandoval, Tom and Katie (VPR), Jax and Brittany, Michelle and Jesse (The Valley), Lindsay and Carl (Summer House).

As we dive headfirst into wedding season, marriage — and the end of it — is on the brain. And after our last episode about Grazie Sophia Christie’s viral essay in The Cut urging college-aged women to marry older and richer stat, we realized we had a whole lot more to say on the subject.

For this episode, we looked at some of the major research that has come out in the last year about marriage and its correlation to self-reported happiness. Claire read Lenz’s divorce-as-liberation polemic, “This American Ex-Wife,” and Emma watched way too many lectures by Brad Wilcox, author of “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.” (Yes, his book title does indeed sound extremely fascist-coded.) We brought our own lived experiences as a married person and a not-married-but-partnered person into the conversation.

And we asked ourselves a bunch of questions: How should we be thinking about marriage and divorce? Is it okay to want marriage? Is divorce the only logical answer to marriage’s gender inequities? What sorts of policies could transform the boundaries of these conversations altogether? And what would a world look like with marriage as an option rather than a central organizing principal?

Hope you enjoy our winding conversation. Xo

“Take A Wife… Please!,” Olga Khazan, The Atlantic

“Is (Heterosexual) Marriage A Diet?,” Virginia Sole-Smith, Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith

“Should I Leave My Husband? The Lure Of Divorce,” Emily Gould, The Cut

“To Be Happy, Marriage Matters More Than Career,” David Brooks, New York Times

“The All-Or-Nothing Marriage,” Eli J. Finkel, New York Times

“Blue Marriage And The Terror Of Divorce,” Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study

“Splinters: Another Kind Of Love Story,” Leslie Jamison

“This American Ex-Wife,” Lyz Lenz

“What’s So Great About Marriage?,” Plain English with Derek Thompson

“The Deep Conflict Between Our Work and Parenting Ideals,” The Ezra Klein Show

“What Relationships Would You Want, If You Believed They Were Possible?,” The Ezra Klein Show

If you liked reading this, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Patreon!

Give us feedback or suggest a topic for the pod • Subscribe • Request a free subscription

Last week, New York Magazine’s The Cut published an all-time banger of a hate read — which is saying something, considering the run they’ve been on recently (from the “$50k in a shoebox” piece to the “tried to leave my husband and then realized I was just having a breakdown” piece). Grazie Sophia Christie’s floridly written and smugly framed essay, “The Case for Marrying an Older Man,” argues, with all the wisdom and certainty earned through 27 years on earth and 4 years of marriage, that leveraging youth and beauty to marry an older man is a cheat code for women, who are otherwise condemned to years of miserable labor alongside insufficient same-age partners. In her case, as she contends, it seems like a lucky jackpot: her husband, a handsome French count just 10 years older than her, is wealthy and came into the relationship mid-career, with a thrice-weekly housecleaner and polished manners. Basically, she’s figured out that marrying a rich man can come with some material benefits.

It’s little wonder this opus, despite its unoriginal thesis, ignited an old-school Twitter discourse cycle. Feminism is in a time of struggle and retrenchment, while women jaded by its failures have begun to succumb to the nostalgic appeal of traditional gender roles. Trad wifery is on the rise. Hot girls are craving a soft life and romanticizing everything. For all its faults, Christie’s essay has its finger firmly on the pulse.

So we decided to talk through what the piece argues explicitly and what it signals implicitly, what feelings it brought up in us, what it signals about the state of women’s progress, and what a feminist movement should offer as an alternative to everyone giving up and trying to marry the richest men we can. And like the original essay, our conversation ended up being far less about age gaps than it was about class, gender politics, and the costs of tying women’s worth to their youth… while they have it. We also referenced a couple fellow Substackers’ thought-provoking responses to the essay: B.D. McClay’s “Here’s the deal” and Kelly Johnson’s “On being a woman in America.” Hope you enjoy! xo

If you liked reading this, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Patreon!

Give us feedback or suggest a topic for the pod • Subscribe • Request a free subscription

One of the first things you notice about “Irish Wish,” the latest output of Lindsay Lohan’s deal with Netflix, is just how… saturated the colors are. The pink accents in her plaid knee-length dress look a little too pink. The green grass of the Irish countryside is a little too green. The blue of the water is a little too blue. Are we in Ireland at all, you start to wonder? Is that real clothing? Are those real human beings? Is this all a simulation? And why in god’s name is Ayesha Curry there?

For the uninitiated, “Irish Wish” stars Lohan as book editor Maddie (you know she’s bookish and romantically awkward because she wears glasses!!!!), who has been harboring a secret crush on her star client, Paul Kennedy (Alexander Vlahos). Well, it’s a secret from her besties, Emma (Elizabeth Tan) and Heather (Ayesha Curry), not from her mom, Jane Seymour, who clearly only agreed to film for one day and did not want to be in the vicinity of the rest of the cast, so she mostly appears on FaceTime. At the red carpet (!!!!), paparazzi-stalked (!!!!) book launch (!!!!) for Paul’s latest novel, he connects with Emma over their shared interest in false lashes, and a few short months later, Maddie is being whisked off to Ireland for their wedding, all the while wishing that she was marrying Paul Kennedy. Luckily, a mystical fairy Catholic saint lady appears and grants Maddie’s wish. Suddenly she’s in an alternate reality, about to get married to a man who would wear a PLAID SUIT TO HIS OWN WEDDING. But there’s also the “cheeky English guy” (Ed Speleers) she met at the airport…. Hijinks ensue!

We needed reinforcements to properly unpack why this movie shook us to our cores and also made us laugh so very much. Luckily, Nora McInerny of She Tried and Terrible, Thanks for Asking was game to talk it all through. Hope you enjoy! Xo

If you liked reading this, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Patreon!

Give us feedback or suggest a topic for the pod • Subscribe • Request a free subscription

UPDATE: On the afternoon of March 22, Princess Catherine announced that she is undergoing treatment for cancer. Our thoughts are with her and her family, and we wish her a swift recovery. This discussion primarily focuses on what the public reactions to her stepping back from public life say about the culture / the role of the royal family.

Nearly three months after the last official appearance of Catherine, the Princess of Wales, and following approximately 17 waves of fevered speculation about the cause of her unusually long absence from the public eye, we decided it was time to dedicate an episode to KateGate. Where is Kate? Why has the U.K.’s future queen and preeminent momfluencer — a woman who thrice appeared for photos in heels, a blowout and full makeup mere hours after giving birth — disappeared from view for months at a time? And what does it mean that so many of the public, including American non-royal-watchers like ourselves, have gotten swept into the furor of conspiracy theorizing that has filled the void of her reliable presence?

Sara Petersen of In Pursuit of Clean Countertops joined us to recap the timeline of events since this PR mess first began brewing, to discuss a few of the major theories behind her absence, and — most importantly — to unpack the seductiveness of this particular path down the rabbit hole.

We examine Kate’s role as a momfluencer and a stalwart of the royal family, both of which center around being continuously available for public viewing. We also get into the shaky reputation of the English royal family at this historical moment, and how the well-documented horrific experiences of Princess Diana and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, with marrying into the royal family have shaped our expectations for what scandals must be brewing behind the scenes. And we consider how this particular conspiracy has thrived in a post-truth media climate, in which AI-generated and Photoshopped images make it difficult to trust any visual evidence — and how this plays into our own anxieties about our fundamental replaceability. We hope you enjoy! xo

Ellie Hall’s thorough timeline and analysis: “It’s getting weirder: BuzzFeed News’ former royals reporter on Kate Middleton, Palace PR, and distrust in the media”

Sara Petersen’s “Kate as the ultimate momfluencer” essay

Charlie Warzel’s analysis of how Kate Middleton conspiracy theories are thriving in a post-truth, AI-fueled media landscape: “Kate Middleton and the End of Shared Reality”

Elizabeth Holmes’s measured Substack coverage of Kate’s health situation and the swirl of conspiracy theories in response to it

Fran Hoepfner’s takedown of the Kate-as-imaginary-revolutionary theories: “Wherever She Is, Kate Middleton Isn’t on Our Side”

Anna Russell’s New Yorker essay on the cultural forces at play in the explosion of conspiracy theories: “The Kate Middleton Conspiracy-Theory Swirl”

Kathryn VanArendonk’s look at the many failures of Kensington Palace’s press team: “The Royals Are So Bad at This”

Madison Malone Kircher’s NYT interview with Heidi Agan, a professional Kate Middleton impersonator who has gone on the record to deny being the woman seen at the Windsor Farm Shop: “This Is Not Princess Catherine”

If you liked reading this, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Patreon!

Give us feedback or suggest a topic for the pod • Subscribe • Request a free subscription

It only took six seasons of “Love Is Blind” for Netflix and Kinetic to get Nick and Vanessa Lachey some real media training. At long last, our fair hosts seem to have discovered the power of a follow-up question! (They did seem to basically forget to ask about the majority of Jimmy and Chelsea’s relationship, but… baby steps.)

This year’s reunion had some real production value behind it, was (blessedly) not live, and the Lacheys held some cast members’ feet to the fire — namely Jeramey, Sarah Ann and Trevor. Guess there’s a first time for everything! We also got some (incomplete) clarity on where the broken-up couples stand with each other today, who has regrets, and who did a very campy JCPenney portrait shoot (Amy and Johnny, obvi).

We would have liked to see more from Chelsea and Jimmy, specifically space for Chelsea to reflect on what she may have learned not to do in a relationship from this experience, but all in all, it was a pretty solid reunion episode.

We also did a little (by little we mean more than 40-minute-long) check-in about the conclusion of “The Traitors” season 2. (Skip to 1:32:55 if you just want the “Traitors” discussion!)

We got into Pilot Pete’s fall, the gameplay of our last two traitors, the rom-com-ish final moments of the season, and all the people still holding grudges. (We see you, MJ and Phaedra!) Hope you enjoy! Xo

If you liked reading this, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Patreon!

Give us feedback or suggest a topic for the pod • Subscribe • Request a free subscription

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains some spoilers for the finale of season 6 of “Love Is Blind.”

The Charlotte-based “Love Is Blind” season that started out so promisingly is looking pretty diminished by the finale — at least when you’re counting couples. Season 6 ended up being as short on weddings as season 5, and similarly gave us more mess than romance.

But the finale was no less rich of an episode because of the smaller number of weddings, opening with a scorched-earth fight between Chelsea and Jimmy and reaching a crescendo with a wedding that was more about the riveting intergenerational drama of Clay’s family than it was about the couple. In this pod, we examine almost every frame of the Chelsea/Jimmy throwdown and each conversation Clay and his mother have with and about Clay’s father. Also, Amy and Johnny’s wedding, which is more of a palate cleanser than part of the action. Hope you enjoy! xo

If you liked reading this, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Patreon!

Give us feedback or suggest a topic for the pod • Subscribe • Request a free subscription