Extra Large 'Cool'
Brief life update: Things! Have! Been! Happening!
It’s been a relatively hectic summer/fall around here. My husband and I moved about a month ago, and we’re still getting used to the new place. (One thing that I’ve been noticing: it’s a little strange and disorienting in the mornings when you can still smell your environs, because your new home doesn’t smell like you yet. It somehow doesn’t even smell like our stinky dog yet.) ((Extra parenthetical: The house came with app-enabled blinds and garage door and… I hate this trend? Lowering my blinds via phone instead of the old-fashioned way—aka, with my hand—seems high-key pointless. And then it took me two to three weeks to get the glitchy app for the garage door to sync with my phone. Booooooooo.))
I then added onto my plate some random classes. I started a stained-glass class a couple of weeks ago—results above—and it turns out that cutting glass is actually quite easy provided you’ve got the right tools and you don’t mind getting microscopic glass pieces embedded in your fingers (they disappear within a day or so; don’t ask me how). After my Paris trip in June and watching the new series La Maison, I signed up to learn French. (I figure I will never, ever get the pronunciation right starting the language at this point in my life, but c’est la vie.) And I tried a Pickleball 101 class yesterday, which is basically Tennis If It Didn’t Hurt, except I definitely had to lie down in the shower afterward because I was so tired.
I guess this is the Childless Dog Lady life?
-Inkoo
A few extra links in this post, because it’s been awhile since my last one.
—I don’t know that La Maison, a Paris-set, French-language succession soap set in the fashion world, is for everyone. But I really enjoyed it for its keen psychology of the rich and dynastically minded and its almost laughably lavish production budget.
—Also pretty good: the new comedy English Teacher, from Brian Jordan Alvarez.
—Whenever people ask me what to watch, I usually say: Evil, from the creators of The Good Wife. (Almost invariably, they’ve never heard of it.) I finally got the chance to write about this exceedingly smart, exceedingly unique show, one of my absolute favorites of the past half-decade.
—‘Bowen Yang Is Sorry He’s Not Your Clown Today.’ An exceptional profile from my colleague Michael Schulman.
—‘The End of Adoptions from China.’ I’ll read probably anything by Barbara Demick, who wrote this even-keeled, clear-eyed elegy for China’s transnational adoption system that explains why it’s probably the right decision for the children.
—‘The Prince We Never Knew.’ I don’t have any special attachment to Prince—though I know many people who do—but this piece is a can’t-miss about the posthumous celebrity industrial complex and the possibly doomed fate of Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour documentary about the singer.
—‘The BTK Killer’s Daughter. Gabby Petito’s Parents. JonBenét’s Dad. America turned their darkest moments into a never-ending spectacle. I went to see just how far that’s gone.’ Luke Winkie is doing some great work at Slate. (We never overlapped.) This dispatch from a true-crime convention is as (emotionally) gory as it sounds, but also nuanced and almost(?) uplifting.
—‘Local News Is Dying, but Not in San Francisco.’ Always weird but nice to see good news!
—‘‘Barely surviving’: Some flight attendants are facing homelessness and hunger.’ Where do airline profits go? Not to the employees that customers interact with the most on flights.
—‘The summer Europe turned on tourists.’ Interesting view on how locals are trying to grapple with overtourism.
—‘What's the best phone to do crimes on?’ This was an astounding—dare I say, cinematic?—listen from the Search Engine podcast.