The Week In Recommendations 7.31.24

The Olympics, Owala-mania, rejected wedding gowns and Kamala's ascent.

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 about the “Love Island USA”! An episode about Ballerina Farm and “childless cat ladies” is coming on Monday! Rich Text is a completely reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

Claire has been reading… 📖

Mary Gaitskill’s new essay in Granta, “The Pneuma Illusion,” which recounts her strange experiences with a New Age body work therapy she calls “Pneuma.” I can’t do justice to this weird and wonderful essay, which interrogates the boundaries and expectations we have for therapeutic relationships. What harm will we accept, in the hope of finding healing alongside it? What hidden depths do we contain – layers of forgotten memories, buried desires, repressed traumas, and calcified coping mechanisms – and when we allow someone to rummage through those depths, are they more likely to help or hurt us? Where does therapy end and a cultish attachment begin? I was gripped through the entire piece.

Emma has been reading… 📖

The incisive Ballerina Farm profile in The Times of London, in which the reporter gets observes a rather chilling dynamic between influencer Hannah Neeleman and her JetBlue scion husband, Daniel Neeleman. (I will be thinking for years about the fact that the son of a literal billionaire can’t be bothered to build his wife a dance studio on their giant farm, and also this video of the time he gave her an EGG APRON for her birthday instead of tickets to Greece. Religious conservatism is a cult, and a dangerous one that that.)

I also loved Jelani Cobb’s New Yorker essay, “Kamala Harris Isn’t Going Back.”

Claire has been watching… 📺

“Too Hot to Handle” Season 6: the Bad Lana season. “Too Hot to Handle” hasn’t managed to garner as loyal and large of a following as its Netflix spring 2020 classmate  “Love Is Blind” – and I get it, though I was obsessed with the first season. Maybe it’s because hot people don’t need to develop personalities, or at least can’t be bothered showing them while they’re pursuing casual hookups; it starts to get a bit stultifying to watch 24-year-olds with Instagram face telling each other “you’re exactly my type, I love your butt, maybe we should just kiss??? Even though people will be mad???” for hours on end. But I’m back for season 6, which has some new twists: the contestants all know what show they’re on and have actually signed up with self-improvement in mind, there’s an evil version of Lana that encourages them to break rules, and bad behavior can get them sent to a banishment chamber where they have to don loose olive-colored pant sets that resemble clothes I wear all the time (which the contestants deem so hideous that wearing them is akin to torture, full offense taken). It’s fun! And I still wish they’d come up with some more interesting things to talk about!

Emma has been watching… 📺

The Olympics! Swimming, gymnastics, surfing, diving — inject the Summer Olympics right into my veins! There’s nothing quite like watching an elite athlete complete feats you could only dream of and then be rewarded with a medal on an international stage. I had never heard of any of the young men on the USA Gymnastics team, but now I am obsessed with them all. Especially Stephen Nedoroscik and his glasses.

Also, “Betrayal: A Father’s Secret,” a three-part ABC docuseries which came out on Hulu on July 30. It’s based on the second season of the “Betrayal” podcast, which I have recommended a few times in this newsletter, and follows the story of Ashley Lytton, a mother of three who discovered that her husband Jason had been consuming and producing child sexual abuse material — including videos of his own stepdaughter. The series follows the lead of the podcast’s victim-centric, responsible and empathetic approach to telling these kind of stories.

Photo Credit: ABC / Hulu

Claire has been listening to… 🎧

Road trip music for our six-hour drive up to the Finger Lakes! We were braced for a rough trip, since my one-year-old is out of the sleepy potato phase and not yet in the iPad addict phase, but incredibly he barely made a peep the whole time, either sleeping or quietly cooing in his carseat. The four-year-old watched many episodes of “Fire Buds” and “Transformers: Rescue Bots” on his tablet, but when he wasn’t watching, we all listened to the “Encanto” soundtrack over and over again. (He’s still young enough to giggle with genuine amusement when I dramatically lip-sync to “Surface Pressure” in the front seat.) When he was locked into a show, we put on mixes of the pop punk/emo music we both loved in high school – Something Corporate, Blink-182, The Starting Line, Taking Back Sunday – for much quieter sing-alongs than we had before we became parents. And when the baby seemed to verge on fussing in the backseat, we’d switch to Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter for a gentler, but still sing-along-able, soundtrack. It was, to my surprise, a rather lovely drive each way.

I’m behind on all my podcasts, since summer vacation is somehow more fun but also much more unrelenting than a regular work week, but I did get to the Know Your Enemy pod on Joe Biden’s decision to step aside, and the ascent of Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket, which satisfied my need to bask in the excitement and relief surrounding this development. 

Emma has been listening to… 🎧

The latest Pod Save America episode about Kamala Harris’ surge and J.D. Vance’s absolute flop era, and The Viall Files episode with “Love Island USA’s” Kendall. My interests are a study in contrasts!!! Women contain multitudes!!!

Claire has been buying… 🛍️

A GLDN pendant with a peony to add to my pendants of my sons’ initials (a Mother’s Day gift from Greg). I love my M and N discs, which are solid gold and really stand up to daily wear, but I found myself wanting to add a slightly larger pendant to accent my basic summer uniform of sundresses and sandals. I wasn’t ready to commit to a solid gold addition, so I went with a gold-fill disc with a peony. GLDN is my go-to for everyday jewelry; I love that it offers different finish options – including solid gold for investment pieces – and so many illustrations and inscriptions. 

The Owala FreeSip Straw Cup, which was the official water bottle of my family summer vacation. I noticed my younger brother’s first, as he has the bottle in a rainbow of saturated colors, but then I realized everyone was toting an Owala. I love the visual design, but I was more drawn by the functional elements: it has a built-in straw, but you can also tilt it back to drink from it like a cup. I love not having to choose! Plus it closes securely to toss in a bag. Stanley cups have never appealed to me, as they seem ungainly to carry around the city (my life is not cupholder-based), and I see why the FreeSip has developed a fanbase to rival the Stanley tumbler.

Emma has been buying… 🛍️

Nothing super fun this week, although I am newly incensed by the way that nearly every bridal appointment now charges you a fee just to walk in the door. (Related: Would people be interested in a post of wedding gowns that I tried on but didn’t buy, similar to this one my bud

Amanda Montell

of

MAGICAL OVERTHINKERS

published? By the end of this process, it will be so many.) [Editor’s note: YES.]

Unfortunately for me, I’ve been spending my money this week on repelling rodents from making a home inside of my Hyundai Accent’s engine. Apparently this is a very commonplace thing that happens in New York City cars??? I took my car in to my neighborhood shop after we had a weird shaking incident driving back from the Hamptons over the weekend, and learned that rats had just been chilling under my hood and leaving remnants all around my car’s engine. (Did I mention that I have a phobia of rats and mice???) Still waiting to see if they ate through any wires — that’ll be super fun! — but for now I’m purchasing this Loraffe Under Hood Animal Repeller. 😩😩😩 [Editor’s note: NO!]

Claire has been making… 🧶

I haven’t made much lately, as it’s been an eventful couple of weeks. First we all got Covid, during which we survived on crackers, canned soup, pizza, and a couple super-easy HungryRoot meals I had in the fridge. Then we recovered just in time to make part of our summer vacation, a much-anticipated visit to my older brother’s family up near the Finger Lakes, where we wrangled kids while my brother and sister-in-law fed us all a steady diet of grilled vegetables, burgers, chicken sandwiches, blueberry pancakes and watermelon. He even baked the baby’s first birthday cake (this luxuriant olive oil chocolate cake from Smitten Kitchen) before I had even had my first coffee that morning. 

But I never got around to recommending this dairy-free pesto pasta with chicken, which I made a few weeks ago for a quick summer dinner. The bowtie pasta went over gangbusters with the four-year-old, though he wasn’t so sure about having “green stuff” all over it. It was a bit oily – I might cut back on the olive oil next time – but the chopped basil and vegan pesto transformed leftover chicken breast and pasta into a temptingly herbaceous, if slightly slippery, summer dinner.

Emma has been making… 🧶

Zainab Shah’s NYT Cooking recipe for Borani Banjan (Afghan-style Eggplant in Yogurt). This was so delicious and so easy, my two favorite things when it comes to a dinner dish. I forgot to buy pomegranate seeds when I was at the grocery store, so I skipped that topping, but it still came together beautifully. The garlicky yogurt! The nearly-caramelized eggplant slices! The richly-flavored simmered tomatoes! I also added some shawarma-style chicken thighs from Hungryroot on top to really make it a filling (and complete) dinner. I loved it and my partner did too. Already planning to make this one again.

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