STARGIRL

This week we’re joined by internet sensations Amelia and Evan of Girls Rewatch podcast to discuss Lena Dunham, two years after we first knighted her as an original Stargirl. We discuss Lena’s work and life post-Girls (Sharp Stick, her new show Too Much, and her marriage, chronic illness, and perma-hibernation mode) and assess the past 10 years of self-conscious scripted comedy (White Lotus, Broad City, Fleabag, Sex Lives of College Girls, Severance, Insecure, And Just Like That, etc.). We also analyze Gen Z’s reclamation of Marnie and reminisce about the Dream of mid-2010s creative Brooklyn advanced by the best TV show of all time. 

Listen to / watch / follow Girls Rewatch podcast, and follow Amelia and Evan <3

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Links:

• STARGIRL Episode 12: Lena Dunham Part I (2022)

• Sharp Stick Lena’s movie from 2022

• Too Much, Lena’s forthcoming show
  “Lena Dunham’s Change of Pace” Rachel Syme in The New Yorker (2024)

This week we travel back in time 100 years (!) to meet Edna St. Vincent Millay, girl poet and emblem of 1920s Greenwich Village bohemia. We are joined by the writer (and my former professor) Kate Bolick, who wrote extensively about Millay in her 2015 book Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own. We discuss Edna’s passionate free spirit, her tragic end, and the self-renewing Dream of writerly collaboration in downtown New York. More importantly, we discuss the age old question of how to build a sustainable life as a woman artist — how to define “meaning” vs. “noise” for yourself, and how to live it out with poise.

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Discussed:

• Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, Kate Bolick (2015)

• “All the Single Ladies” Kate Bolick in The Atlantic (2011)

• Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Nancy Milford (2002)

• “How Fame Fed on Edna St. Vincent Millay” Maggie Doherty in The New Yorker (2022)

• The Long Winded Lady (collection of essays by Maeve Brennan in The New Yorker)

*Full episode on Patreon*

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This week we go long on the evolution of Julia, the woman behind the cult YouTube channel Itsblitzzz. We reflect on the many lives she’s lived in her 15+ years online: DIY T-shirt reconstruction guru, yatted nightlife star, Los Angeles ASMR artist royalty, full on mommy blogger, and more. We also explore her fans’ somewhat nihilistic but understandable grief over the fact that she no longer represents a scene kid cultural underbelly, the line between being a Cool Loner and plain agoraphobic, and what you lose / gain as you grow up and life gets smaller.

Welcome back to the next episode of The Body Series, where we go deep on all the best STARGIRL themes: embodiment, warring conceptions of “health” and “fitness,” and what a “mind-body connection” looks like in practice.

Today we’re blessed by Sasha Hanway, a coach on the Ladder app and a certified personal trainer, yoga teacher, breathwork and meditation coach, and holistic nutrition coach.

We go Back to Basics mode: the importance of building and maintaining muscle as you age, why progressive overload is the most effective way to train, why people tend to overcomplicate nutrition, and how all of this plays a role in the current metabolic crisis we face in the United States.

Sasha also shares her experience navigating social media as a fitness influencer, her duty to share reputable studies and research, and how to find trusted voices in the sea of online fitness content.

As a former college athlete, Sasha has always loved movement, but it was progressive overload strength approach combined with deep core work that truly transformed her body. She’s on a mission to help women shift their mindsets to take up space and be bold: to nourish themselves and fall in love with their bodies and movement. Her program ALIGN, found on the Ladder app, blends mindfulness, strength, yoga, mobility and deep core work, and has helped thousands of women transform their bodies and their relationship with exercise. Sasha is also a recreational runner, surfer and lives in the PNW with her husband, stepson, and rescue cat Baby Ru. 

Follow Sasha on IG and work out with her on Ladder!

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Links:

• “Fitness startup Ladder comes for Peloton for allegedly copying their app” Sarah Perez, TechCrunch (2024)

• Other voices I love on these topics: Lauren Kanski, Kelly LeVeque, Dr. Peter Attia, Dr. Casey Means, @GlucoseGoddess, @feelwellbyanna
  

  
  Book a free personal training consult call with Emma! (Note: I am not currently accepting new clients, but feel free to get in touch and I’ll add you to the waitlist!)

This week we delve into the relentless and perverted mind of Catherine Breillat, the French filmmaker and novelist who has disturbed audiences for 50 years. Broadly consideredcinéma du corps,Catherine’s movies explore the grotesqueness of sex and the body, depraved sexual longing, petulant, manipulative, and erratic women, and fraught and often violent sexual encounters.

In this episode, we explore Breillat’s ability to craft characters we can’t stand, invert the expected power dynamics between men and women, and engender such a visceral response from her audience. We also review her many capital-c Controversies and discuss how her insistence on women’s manipulative tendencies works so well in art and… less well in real life. 

Plus! More on Ripe / Dead psychology, a rant on Margaret Qualley from Holly, and a rave on Eileen Kelly / @killerandasweetthang from Linnea Grace. 

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Mentioned:

• STARGIRL Episode 50: The Body Series with Eloise Skinner 

• CRUSH Rachel Antonoff SS 2014 short (Margaret Qualley prototype foreshadowing…) 

• Movies by Catherine Breillat:A Real Young Girl(1976),36 Fillette(1988),Romance(1999),Fat Girl(2001),Sleeping Beauty(2011),Abuse of Weakness(2013),Last Summer(2024)

• “Catherine Breillat’s Unselling Cinema of Desire” Victoria Uren (2025)

• Catherine Breillat’s response to allegations of sexual misconduct

“State of Grace: Catherine Breillat on Last Summer” interview with Grace Byron inScreen Slate(2024)

This week we go back to basics and investigate what one of the world’s hottest young women has to teach us about our own self hate (!). We revisit the classic STARGIRL paradigm of Ripe vs. Dead and examine the latent Threat of Dead beauty, and traverse Lily-Rose’s metaphorical potential as a descendant of Hollywood Royalty, ready and willing sex object, and generational leader in her own right.

We also revisit our conversation about the simultaneous crumbling of and longing for trusted institutions via a few current events: the LA fires and David Lynch’s passing, the TikTok ban fakeout, and President Trump’s inauguration. 

Plus! A Rave on classic and beloved Stargirl Sky Ferreira, from Helen <3

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Discussed:

• Addison’s Rolling Stone cover story

• Kelela new music (?) announcement

• Lily-Rose Depp on the Happy Sad Confused podcast

• “Extremely Overanalyzing Hollywood’s Nepo Baby Boom” New York Magazine (2022)

• Lily-Rose Depp provided pale skin brown nipple representation on screen discourse

• The Power Notebooks, Katie Roiphe (2020)

*Full episode on Patreon*

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Today we travel back in time to the early 2010s and delve into the moody, mysterious soundscape of Kelela, the singer and dance music producer who soundtracked my early twenties. We explore her evolution from Muse to a handful of forward-thinking, UK-based producers to an Artist in her own right, why she stands above the scores of more famous Alt R&B artists (FKA Twigs, Solange, SZA, Tinashe, etc.), and the ways she’s employed more Narrative Control in recent years by explicitly defining her audience and who she will and won’t work with. We also check in on the Club — the rules of it, who it is and isn’t “for," and whether or not it's meaningfully alienating... anyone in 2025.

PLUS! This episode features exclusive voice notes from my husband, weirdo music nerd, and former club kid, David <3

Mentioned:

Kelela interview with Tanya Bunter (2023)

Raven review/profile in NYT (2023)

Interview in Dazed(2022)

Happy New Year!

In this episode of The Body Series, I share my entire fitness journey: Growing up as a ballerina to college weight gain, inactivity, and depression, finding weightlifting and getting my sh*t together, getting injured, experimenting with different styles of training, and eventually becoming a personal trainer. 

I also explore the various mindsets and motivations I’ve had with working out, examine online fitness content vs. IRL gym culture, and opine on how we could make the gym feel sexier with different tropes, narratives, and interior design :)

I believe that getting fit is a site of huge personal transformation. Doing so completely changed my identity, helped me build self trust, and even made me a stronger and more original thinker. 

Follow STARGIRL on ⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠ for more!

I have a few more 1:1 personal training spots open for both in-person (NYC) and virtual clients. Book a free 30-minute consult call with me to learn more!

If you’re into these ideas, check out the following:

• The Body Series with Dr. Cameron Yuen

• The Body Series with Jordan Castro

• My guest episode on Nymphet Alumni
  My interview in Fast Company on the rise of body-centric imagery in consumer products

Happy Holidays! In this Christmas Special, we enter the timeless, charmed world of Dame Julie Andrews and my favorite movie of all time, The Sound of Music. We explore how Rodgers & Hammerstein evolved and elevated the musical as a form, the grand folk ideal of Maria von Trapp (vs. the self-conscious twee heroines of the 2010s), the actually-very-adult lessons of The Sound of Music, and the Dream / Threat of Unassailable Goodness. 

My word for 2025 is Majestic — see you there ✨

Follow STARGIRL on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠TikTok⁠ for more!

Discussed:

• The Sound of Music (1965)

• “Audrey and Her Sisters” Wayne Koestenbaum in London Review of Books (1997)

• Julie Andrews on Julia Louis Dreyfus podcast (2024)

• “Maria von Trapp: The Preeminent Manic Pixie Dream Girl” Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic (2015)

• Zendaya X On Running in the Alps

*Full episode on Patreon*

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To celebrate the end of a wild year, we’ve got a special, 2-in-1 episode for y’all:

First, Addison Rae Part II: A return to the crux of the STARGIRL project. I delve deep into my ever-evolving, sort of twisted relationship with Addison Rae and reflect on how, when I first intercepted her in 2020, she alerted me to how far I had strayed from what I actually valued and wanted in my life. This is STARGIRL theory of the universe at its best: When we let our fixations be a guiding light, rather than something to repress or indulge ironically, we shed layers of cope and allow ourselves to actually emerge and evolve.

Then, we look back at the dominant STARGIRL conversations of 2024: Spirituality, Health and Fitness, Feminine Caricature, and Nostalgia for / Mistrust of Institutions. Of note: the return to New Age dirty hippie vibes; animal based diets; the revived interest in fitness and athleticism; Brat; “Aquamarine,” modern dance, and Lexee Smith; Wicked, the totally delegitimized “arbiters of health,” Luigi….. And more. 

Plus, Rants / Raves on Emma Chamberlain (c/o @tuylor) and Scout Dixon West (c/o Madeleine).

Discussed:

• “As Time Goes By” Saint Laurent video starring Addison

• Addison + rude reporters at Vanity Fair Oscar Party (2022)

• “Grottocore” Daisy Alioto for DIRT (2024)

• “The Architect” Kacey Musgraves as Gwyneth in famous Goop cover

• Ballerina Farm feature in Evie magazine 

• “Aquamarine” music video

• Horton technique trending sound on TikTok