The Week In Recommendations 12.6.23

"May December," a scathing reality profile, a twisty podcast, a nursing dress, and glittery holiday party tights!

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter about cultural obsessions from your Internet BFFs Emma and Claire. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Our latest podcast was a candid catch-up conversation! Rich Text is a completely reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

Claire has been reading… 📖

I genuinely can’t think of something I read all week that wasn’t a social media post. Send help! Things are not going smoothly over here!

Emma has been reading… 📖

I absolutely loved this Brock Colyar profile of Bethenny Frankel in New York Magazine. He really manages to capture her absolutely frenetic energy, and sharply interrogates the “reality reckoning” she has claimed to be championing. And this lede is just absolutely iconic:

“They’re calling me Erin Brockovich,” Bethenny Frankel tells me, relaxing on the back porch of her luxuriously renovated 18th-century Connecticut farmhouse and wearing a fuzzy sweater and house slippers with peace signs on them. She doesn’t specify who, exactly — besides Bethenny Frankel herself, of course — is calling her Erin Brockovich, but she’s clearly interested in my buying into the comparison, and confident in it. After all, “it’s taking some courage” to do what she’s been doing.

Claire has been watching… 📺

“Frog and Toad”: This one is for the parents! I’ve read a lot of mind-numbing garbage to my son over the last few years, and I’ve watched even more garbage along with him – every iteration of tiny superheroes and tiny dogs that enjoy fighting crime and/or working in construction, many of them with generic pop-punk theme songs that make my ears bleed. Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad” is a rare respite. Our giant “Frog and Toad” anthology is one of the few books that my son and I enjoy in equal measure; the stories are simple and brief yet unhurried, describing unremarkable but cozy moments in the lives of two good friends. Even so, the details can be off-kilter and weird (my kid particularly enjoys an unsettling story about a nightmare Toad has in which he is performing in front of a mostly empty theater). The stories rarely slide into straightforward moral didacticism, but they illustrate, in oblique and unexpected ways, values like compassion, loyalty, generosity, and self-respect. Anyway, apparently Apple+ has an animated show based on the books, which is actually… great?? It captures the sedate pacing, light whimsy, and relaxed simplicity of the books, while fleshing out the stories and adding some quite delightful musical numbers.

Emma has been watching… 📺

“May December,” the buzzy new Natalie Portman-Julianne Moore movie, which landed on Netflix after a short theaters-only run. The movie follows actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) as she embeds herself over the course of a week with Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), and her much younger husband Joe Yoo (Charles Melton). It turns out that Elizabeth is there because she’s going to star in a movie about former tabloid sensation Gracie, who became sexually involved with Joe when he was just 13 years old and working for her at a local pet shop.

The screenplay draws heavily on the real-life Mary Kay Letourneau/ Vili Fualaau story, which dominated tabloids in the late ‘90s. 36-year-old Letourneau groomed and sexually abused Fualaau when he was her 12-year-old student. She went on to have two children with him before he turned 15, and they later married in 2005. They split in 2019, just one year before she died of cancer.

Directed by Todd Haynes, who has helmed movies like 2002’s “Far From Heaven” (also starring Julianne Moore), and 2015’s “Carol,” “May December” is tense and creepy in all the right ways. In fact, it’s almost uncomfortably intimate. It is first and foremost a character study of two women, both of whom have ugly pieces of themselves that they subsume through performance, both of whom manipulate and flatten Joe in the service of their own narratives.

Claire has been listening to… 🎧

“Witnessed: Fade to Black” season five.

This podcast digs into the disappearance of screenwriter Gary Devore in 1997. Many believe that Devore’s suspicious disappearance and death was linked to the new script he was working on, which vanished along with him. That’s because the script drew on alleged knowledge he had of CIA operations in Panama, gleaned from CIA sources who advised on his films. I had never heard of Devore prior to listening, but the unsolved mystery surrounding his death has piqued the interest of conspiracy theorists for decades. I always take conspiracy theories with a giant grain of salt… but of course, the thing about the CIA is that they’ve orchestrated enough malevolent conspiracies that it’s always hard to write off the possibility that they’ve done it again.

Emma has been listening to… 🎧

The latest “Scamfluencers” episode, which digs into the story of political grifter George Santos. The ultimate scam story!! Now with a satisfying, expelled-from-Congress ending.

I also continue to appreciate Ezra Klein’s desire to have difficult discussions, and to educate and inform rather than just blast out propaganda when it comes to Israel-Palestine. His latest episode, in conversation with Tareq Baconi, the president of the board of the think tank Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, is illuminating and important.

Claire has been buying… 🛍️

Dry-erase fridge calendar! As I mentioned in a recent Rich Text pod, the big challenge in adding a second kid to our family has been logistical. I’m not much of a planner, and neither is Greg, so we have done a fair amount of seat-of-the-pantsing with our son’s schedule over the last four years. Then we had another kid. Then we sent Max to public pre-k, which comes with exponentially more random events, assignments, and other asks than daycare did. It rapidly became clear that we needed a calendar rather than 15 conversations a day about our various plans and deadlines. We have failed to effectively use Google Calendar in the past – I just find it harder to grasp and remember to update than a concrete calendar. So I got this clear magnetic one to put on our fridge! It does the job, and I find immense satisfaction in filling it out with all our doctor and dentist appointments, swimming classes, school events, and dress-down days. 

Ingrid and Isabel maternity/nursing ribbed dress: I’m the weirdo who’s still buying maternity clothes at 4 months postpartum, just because that’s my aesthetic now. Also, I miss cozy sweater dresses, as most of them just aren’t nursing-accessible. This one has a faux button front to avoid gaping (especially for those who actually do have pregnant bellies), but two working buttons at the top of the bodice so that I can nurse without fully undressing. It’s soft, flattering, dresses up or down, and doesn’t feel like a maternity dress at all – just a nice wardrobe staple.

Emma has been buying… 🛍️

It’s holiday party season, baby! That means it’s time for some fun tights. I got a pair of Calzedonia sheer silver glitter tights to wear for an event this weekend, and I’m so excited about them. For more glittery fun, I also love these gold diamond-patterned tulle tights, and these ones with multicolor rhinestones all over them.

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