Rich Text

As a girl in the late ‘90s and early aughts, few figures loomed larger than Britney Spears.

She was IT. Her blonde waves, her sugary sweet voice, her sexy-but-virginal winking public image, she represented an ideal I knew I was supposed to strive for and also knew I’d fail to achieve. I choreographed dances to “…Baby One More Time” in my best friend’s room, tying our shirts up in knots in a paltry simulacrum of the sexy schoolgirl outfits Spears and her dancers wear in the music video. I resented her and I revered her all at once.

And then, over the years… she morphed into something else: a cautionary tale. Her very public mental health struggles (and that infamous head-shaving incident) made her a prime target for public ridicule and dismissal.

We all know now that neither version of Spears — the ideal or the cautionary tale — were accurate portrayals of who she really was or is today. As Spears herself acknowledges in her new memoir, “The Woman In Me,” which came out last week, she didn’t know how to play the fame game — at least not well — and she was torn apart in the media (and by those closest to her) as a result.

By the time she was put under conservatorship — a legal designation which kept her working without any control over her life, her money, or her body — she was such an object of pity that it barely occurred to any of us to question it.

“If they’d let me live my life, I know I would’ve followed my heart and come out of this the right way and worked it out,” Spears writes in her memoir. “Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself. I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick.”

“The Woman In Me,” written by Spears alongside journalist Sam Lansky, and narrated by Academy Award-winning actress Michelle Williams, is illuminating, heart-wrenching and also feels thin on details at times. Spears’ pain is apparent throughout, and though she does her best to find lessons in her experiences, it’s clear that she’s still in the muck. It’s a tall order to find meaning and make sense of it all, when she was only released from her conservatorship in 2021. Regardless, it’s a book worth reading.

In this podcast, author Alison Greenberg joins me to discuss our overall feelings about “The Woman In Me,” its themes, what we want for Spears in the future, and the lingering questions this memoir leaves us to contemplate. Hope you enjoy!

**Also, it’s worth watching the 2003 Diane Sawyer interview Spears speaks about in her book. I’m struck by how poised she is throughout the whole thing — funny, honest, restrained, eloquent, emotional. Here it is in full:

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Houston, we had a problem. We continued to have problems. The problems spun out far beyond our TVs — like this lawsuit — and now the problems have ended. That’s right, baby, “Love Is Blind” season 5 has come to a whimpering end.

We got two weddings, one double “I Do,” and a shockingly calm and mature reunion episode. (Raise your virtual hand if you were SO relieved that Vanessa didn’t pressure anyone to have a baby.)

It also became abundantly clear who the real hero of the season was: Milton, our resident 24-year-old who loves metamorphic rocks and also Lydia. Our BFF for life.

Laura and I dug into the finale and reunion episodes in this recap, and gave our final friends/enemies assessments. Hope you enjoy! Xo

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Season of 5 of “Love Is Blind” continues to be an absolute mess, top to bottom.

Episode 8 was full of hard-to-litigate conflicts (Johnie and Izzy, Uche and Lydia, Johnie and Stacy, Uche and Miriam…), and then episode 9 was like emotional whiplash as we prepare for the two — only two! — weddings we will see in the finale.

We also saw our final two couples — Izzy and Stacy, Milton and Lydia — face some substantive conflict. Milton and Lydia clash over their divergent approaches to conflict and confrontation, while Izzy and Stacy confront financial differences, and the question of when and how certain disclosures should be made ahead of a marriage.

But honestly, what’s going on outside of the episodes is almost more interesting than what we’re seeing in them. And we get into *some* of those rumors and reports in this week’s recap.

As always, take these TikTok reports with a GIANT! GRAIN! OF! SALT! These are rumors, and have not been reported.

For those who are interested, on Oct. 3, TikTok user @StorytimeWithRikkii posted a video with some ~tea~ about the four couples that allegedly got engaged but that we didn’t see. She specifically discussed Renee and Carter, who apparently not only got engaged, but filmed the full experience — and were cut from the show in post. And here is a follow-up video that same TikToker posted after we taped this week’s recap.

Whatever the reason was behind their storyline being cut, it shows just how dysfunctional the casting of this season was. I hope we get some more substantive reporting on the behind-the-scenes of this season to give us more clarity on how things ended up being so messy.

For now, I hope you enjoy our recap of episodes 8 and 9, and I’ll leave you with this incredible meme that Renee posted on her Instagram:

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This season of “Love Is Blind” is less about rooting for any of the couples, and more about watching with fascination as relationships fall apart and — maybe — come back together. And this week, the couple that did NOT defy the odds, is horny-for-Americana J.P. and sweet kindergarten teacher Taylor.

After forcing his partner to endure three days of painful awkwardness, in which he answered every question with one word, J.P. revealed to Taylor that the root of their issues was… HER MAKEUP. Yes… her makeup. Because how dare a woman who is filming an internationally broadcast television show put on false eyelashes for her big engagement reveal? The horror!

Luckily, Taylor seemed just as appalled by this as those of us watching, and she decided things between them simply needed to end. Good for you, Tay. No one deserves a life with a semi-sentient American flag.

(I also read — unfortunately after taping this episode — that there were apparently other couples that got engaged that they chose not to follow???? Was this cast truly such a bunch of duds that they just didn’t bother??? I have so many follow-up questions for everyone involved in this production.)

Other dramas discussed in this recap of episodes 5-7: Izzy’s lingering hatred for Johnie, Johnie’s rekindling with Chris, Uche’s in-person meetup with Aaliyah, Uche’s confrontation with Lydia, and all the shower sex scenes we were forced to endure.

Hope you enjoy! Xo

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My main reaction to the first four episodes of “Love Is Blind” season 5? OY.

There are certain conventions of “Love Is Blind,” as there are with every dating show, that we’ve grown to understand and, in a sense, feel comforted by. There will be a Golden Couple who emerges as a sure thing from episode one. There will be at least one major love triangle. By the end of the first drop of episodes, the couples will be engaged, if not already off to Mexico. And — perhaps most significantly — four or five couples WILL get engaged. (And usually more that they don’t follow, which we won’t find out about until the season is airing.)

This season, the rules are out the window. By the end of the fourth episode, we’re still waiting on at least one reveal, one major player has left the show altogether, only three couples are engaged, and there are zero Golden Couples in sight. And in a stunning first, we learn that two cast members DATED EACH OTHER BEFORE!!! (Side note: How has this not happened already?)

One thing that hasn’t changed? “Love Is Blind” providing ample opportunity for me to find new low-stakes, one-sided enemies. Yes, I’m looking at you, Uche.

My dear friend — and brilliant reporter, editor and cultural commentator — Laura Bassett gamely joined me to recap these first four eps. We discuss the messy Chris-Johnie-Izzy-Stacy love square, that Lydia revelation (!!), and all of the unnecessary B-roll of food that was conveniently included after several former cast members claimed they weren’t fed. Hope you enjoy!

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In my humble opinion, few things feel as good as a promising, burgeoning friendship.

As inept as I’ve historically been at finding great men to date, I excel at making new friends. We all have our strengths, and that’s one of mine. Friendships have been the building blocks of my adulthood. I reached 36 as an unmarried, childfree woman with a solid career and a full life. For the last decade and a half, friends have been my companions, my confidantes, my pro bono therapists and my life partners.

The current state of American friendship is a mixed bag. Years of pandemic isolation made people really start to consider the role that friendships play — or fail to play — in their lives. Social circles contracted, loneliness abounded. As the world opened up, we all tried to recalibrate. Should we let friendships that had fallen by the wayside stay there? Should we take it personally if some people didn’t seem that interested in reconnecting with us? How should we be making new friends, now that we were so out of practice — and so many of us were now working from home? If we felt meh about a once-vibrant friendship, should we be telling that friend that it was over for good?

Confusion about protocol combined with a newly-raised consciousness about just how important close social ties are, bred the proliferation of friendship advice. Though well-intentioned, much of this advice feels like a word salad of therapeutic language and a corporate email. On TikTok, “how to break up with a friend” guides abound, including one that went viral where a therapist advises telling a friend that you’ve “treasured our season of friendship,” but you simply “don’t have the capacity to invest in our friendship any longer.”

What this all says to me is that people are yearning for community and connection, and grasping for clear ways to find it. And that’s why I was so excited to sit down with my friend Kelsey McKinney, a brilliant writer and the host of “Normal Gossip,” to have a free-flowing conversation about adult friendship: How to make friends, what it looks like to maintain healthy long-term friendships through different seasons of life, and whether “friendship breakups” should even be a thing.

Hope you enjoy! Xo

“Stop Firing Your Friends,” Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, 2023

“Shine Theory: Why Powerful Women Make The Greatest Friends,” Ann Friedman, The Cut, 2013

“What Adults Forget About Friendship,” Rhaina Cohen, The Atlantic, 2023

“How Many Friends Do You Really Need?,” Catherine Pearson, NYTimes, 2022

“How To Find Your People,” Lane Moore, Vox, 2023

“Men Have No Friends, And Women Bear The Burden,” Melanie Hamlett, Harper’s Bazaar, 2019

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Editor’s Note: The audio quality on this episode is worse than normal because we had to use our backup Zoom recording. Apologies for this! Emma is running an operation of one while Claire is on leave.

Is “Love Is Blind” season 4 the most functional cast in LIB history? After watching the three-part “After The Altar” special which dropped on September 1, I think the answer is yes.

Often a reality dating show reunion special is filled with anxiety and despair. But coming right on the heels of Charity Lawson’s feel-good season finale and “After The Final Rose” special, “After The Altar” 4 delivered more evidence that love is real and less emotional trauma. (Is this because Kinetic’s questionable production practices have been in the news lately? I guess we’ll never know.)

In “After The Altar,” we check in with our couples a year after filming: marrieds Brett and Tiffany, Zack and Bliss, Chelsea and Kwame, as well as unmarried couple Jackie and Josh. All of them seem to be thriving, settling into the satisfying, comforting contours of a relationship where you actually know the other person. (A real contrast to what these people are thrust into during the initial show.)

Pretty much everyone in the cast showed up to filming properly chastened for their wrongs, and ready to make nice. Irina apologizes to Amber. Micah apologizes to Chelsea. Marshall and Jackie apologize to each other. Even Paul and Micah handle their on-and-off situationship with grace and maturity. No wonder they had to bring in minor characters like Paul’s mom and, most notably, Monica, to actually get some drama going.

We learn that Pod Squad member Monica got engaged to Josh during the show’s initial run. However, the relationship quickly fell apart and they were cut from filming (something that happens to one or two engaged couples every season post-pods). Monica posted about her unaired relationship, and this does NOT sit well with Josh — and by extension, Jackie who is a #standbyyourman girlie.

Several accusations of clout-chasing later, Monica might have emerged as the real winner of this mini-series. After all, it’s great to see happy couples, but we’re watching for the absurd, low-stakes conflict. Hope you enjoy the episode! Xo

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While I was watching episode 8 of “And Just Like That’s” second season, I texted Claire an important question: Do I have Stockholm Syndrome, or has this show become significantly more watchable?

After a much-needed nearly two-hour breakdown of the back half of the SATC spinoff’s sophomore season with Claire herself (!!!), my conclusion is that the answer is both.

There were some real delights in episodes 7-11: Miranda going back to work and wearing the most beautiful ombre coat I have ever seen in my god damn life, Charlotte going back to work and getting blackout drunk with her chic colleagues (incredible commitment to physical comedy from Kristin Davis), Miranda having a classic SATC-style doomed meet-cute with an audiobook narrator played by “Younger’s” Miriam Shor, Carrie reconnecting with one of her all-time great loves, Aidan Shaw, an anticlimactic Samantha Jones cameo that somehow still reminded us how much we miss that character and Kim Cattrall’s distinctive embodiment of her. For the first time since the beginning of AJLT season 1, I felt like I was watching characters that seemed to resemble the people I knew them to be in the original series.

But, of course, this is “And Just Like That,” which is to say that it’s a show that fundamentally has no fucking clue what it’s about or what it’s trying to say. It zips through storylines in 30 seconds. It has so many main characters that even though I enjoy most of them, none of them feel truly fleshed out. There’s some absolutely baffling uneasiness with talking about abortion. And for some inexplicable reason, Aidan believes that adulthood only begins at 20.

Claire popped back in from mat leave to recap this stretch of AJLT with me, which is a real gift to us all. Hope you enjoy our conversation about this zany show we love to criticize, but also will watch every episode ever made. Xo

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I have a love-hate relationship with “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” Jenny Han’s 2009-2011 trilogy turned Prime Video hit show. There were so many things I adored about the first season: the idyllic setting of (fake) Cousins Beach, the adult friendship between Belly’s mother, Laurel, and her college bestie Susannah Fisher, the Taylor Swift-heavy soundtrack.

But, as Claire and I discussed last year, there are things about the central love triangle between Belly and Susannah’s two sons, Conrad and Jeremiah — two boys who may as well be Belly’s family members — that make it kind of a bummer if you think too hard about it. The show (and the young actors inhabiting these characters) sell these connections well, and yet, I’m never quite sure how to feel about it all.

I expressed these mixed emotions to my friend, author Alison Greenberg, during one of our impromptu late-night phone calls (side note: how cool is it that as an adult you can just stay up talking at odd hours to your friend and no one can stop you?), and she offered a framework for understanding “The Summer I Turned Pretty” that softened me to it. She argued that TSITP should be considered among the ranks of late ‘90s / early aughts WB channel teen soap classics: “Dawson’s Creek,” “Felicity,” “Popular,” “One Tree Hill,” “Young Americans” etc.

These shows gave teenagers of a certain (millennial) generation an outlet for seeing the Giant Emotions we felt bursting out of us expressed in a compelling package. If Joey Potter could be angsty as fuck, so could we. If Felicity Porter could upend her life to chase a cute boy to New York City, unbelievably embarrass herself, and end up on a journey of self-discovery anyway, then our small moments of humiliation really weren’t so bad.

When I think of TSITP as 2023’s “Dawson’s Creek,” the terrible decisions these kids make feel more reasonable; the overwrought emotions more palatable. And then I can just let myself slip into Team Belly mode, and wonder along with her who she should end up with.

In this episode of Rich Text, Alison joins me to break down TSITP season 2, #TeamJeremiah vs. #TeamConrad, and where we hope the show goes (and doesn’t go) in season 3. Hope you enjoy! Xo

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“Red, White & Royal Blue” is the streaming summer rom-com I’ve been craving. A sexy prince! A sexy First Son! Sexy chemistry! It’s all very sexy and very hopeful and very full of the kind of political wish fulfillment that feels oh so good as we stare ahead at our next presidential election cycle. I wouldn’t call this movie a Great Film but I would call it a whole lot of fun if you can let go and just enjoy the ride.

Based off of NYTimes bestselling author Casey McQuiston’s debut novel of the same name, “Red, White & Royal Blue” follows the enemies-to-lovers romance of Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez), son of the United States’ first female president (Uma Thurman, doing her best Texan accent), and Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), the British royal family’s “spare.”

When the movie begins, these two hate each other. Henry is buttoned up, controlled, and duty bound. Alex is reckless, impulsive, and idealistic. After they get into an altercation at Henry’s brother’s royal wedding, they end up under a pile of multi-multi-multi-tier cake, and on the cover of every tabloid on either side of the pond. In an effort to divert a diplomatic disaster, the two are pushed together by their respective governments, and as they get to know each other, a friendship forms and then blossoms into something much more romantic.

It’s certainly a significantly pared down version of McQuiston’s original story, and the harder edges and complex subplots have been sanded down to focus on the swoony love at the movie’s center. And yet there are things about “Red, White & Royal Blue” that feel like a triumph. Put simply, it’s a rom-com about queer men that operates under the same comforting tropes and cliches that so many straight rom-coms do. (If you’re concerned that a romantic comedy feels “predictable” you’re missing the point of the genre.) It also doesn’t shy away from depicting gay sex, as both hot and tender — though it’s R-rating feels unearned — and Perez and Galatzine have the chemistry to effectively sell the central relationship to viewers. (Of course not everything worked. I still have so many questions about the jilted journalist / ex-lover of Alex’s that becomes the movie’s de facto villain, a character created for the movie.)

My wonderful friend Justin Adams (@justintakesthebach) joined me for this episode, to discuss the highs and lows of this delectable summer rom-com — and President Uma Thurman. Hope you enjoy! Xo

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