Helen Garner’s latest lockdown diaries are wonderful as usual
This is why everyone on Twitter has been talking about a kidney all week
Yes, we’re still obsessively reading everything about Succession we can get our hands on, and yes, this meaty profile of Jeremy Strong in the Guardian and these ooof photographs of Matthew McFayden hit the spot very nicely thank you
How many episodes of a new TV show you should watch before giving up on it
Katie Hawkins-Gaar’s newsletter My Sweet Dumb Brain is always an utter joy to read, but this week’s musings on the importance of listening to your heart is some of the most beautiful (and wise) writing we’ve read in a long time
If you’ve been watching Squid Game, this discussion and this article about what gets lost in translation is important to read
There are some ridiculous things in Kirsten Dunst’s house (an organ, so many model ships) but that didn’t stop us from watching all 12 minutes and 31 seconds of her Architectural Digest home tour
A lot of focus has been on the rising vaccination rates of Israel, the US, UK and other parts of Europe, but little has been said about the success of Portugal — a country with very little anti-vax sentiment that’s running out of people to vaccinate
How many mental illnesses does the internet think you have? These fascinating pieces in Vox and Slate both investigate why TikTok claims everything is a trauma response now (“It often looks like this: A woman posts a TikTok suggesting that “excessive reading” in childhood is considered a “dissociative behaviour.” In the video, she turns to the camera and shakes her head as if having a sudden, life-altering realisation that explains the trajectory of her life.”)
Obsessed with this library of over 3000 open-source emojis
Last month, anonymously leaked Facebook docs revealed pretty serious employee discontent (amongst other things); this week the identity of the whistleblower was revealed as former product manager Frances Haugen, who has some pretty damning evidence that the company deliberately encourages hate speech for profit. Our favourite piece published this week on the whole mess is this article in the Atlantic, which does an excellent job explaining how a company that was once was rebellious and optimistic is now bloated, regretful, and uncool
The day in the life of an Australian contact tracer
This week we learnt that Andrew Lloyd Webber was so traumatised after seeing the Hollywood version of his musical Cats that he bought himself a dog
Speaking of bad musicals, Diana the Musical premiered on Netflix this week, and the internet is in agreement that it’s too awful to even hate watch. The best review comes courtesy of Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, who describes it best when he says: “My own personal nervous breakdown approached when Diana’s second child is born, and she sings the following lines into his cot: “Harry, my ginger-haired son / You’ll always be second to none!”
