this week’s style icon:
Molly, the most controversial wooden automaton bird in Brooklyn
where i’m traveling:
Getting ready for a cruise down the Nile
what I’m clicking:
The disappearing airplane barf bag | The boys in the baths | The same-ification of NYC | What happened at the peptide party | Candy vegetables and tickets to the cornfield | How to disappear completely | Death becomes him | Haunted by Leonard Cohen | Haunted by RL Stine | The dark side of mindfulness | The wild west of egg freezing | How to destroy a reputation | The trail of Sycamore Gap || Tear gas and teenagers | A night out with republicans during the blue wave | The geopolitics of Eurovision
what i’m wanderlusting:
Wouldn’t it be cute if we rented our own private train for a cross-country party?
what i’m listening to:
You know you’re getting old when you have to go to physical therapy for vertigo due to headbanging at a bar in Nepal when the metal band played Zombie. (I am happy to report that the vertigo was horrifying but short-lived thanks to the Epley maneuver.) If this song isn’t already in your personal top 100 of all time, I encourage you to go down the rabbit hole of stadium sing-alongs.
what i’m watching:
The absolutely spectacular joy of finding out that one of my favorite books of all time has been turned into a TV show can only be tempered by the horrible news that it did not get renewed for another season. There is A LOT more material to work with here. Can somebody please do whatever it takes for us to get more seasons of Shantaram??!?!?!
what i’m eating:
Hawaiian pizza seems to be about the only cultural taboo left in New York City. It is basically never on the menu, and admitting that you like it can get you ex-communicated from your favorite neighborhood slice shop. Luckily for me, Milkflower in Queens seems to not give a fuck, and their version uses speck and jalapeno. (I recommend ordering out vs. dining in.)
what i’m drinking:
Haley came home from Maine with like 10 pounds of hard, sour little apples so I took that as an excuse to fulfill a long-repressed desire to be somebody who owns a juicer. My requirements were that it had to be easy to clean, under $250, and from a brand I’ve heard of instead of a fake drop-shipping company. I settled on this little Ninja juicer and so far I am loving it because all the bits can go in the dishwasher BUT it makes an ungodly awful screeching. Whatever sound you are imagining, it’s not that one. It’s worse.
what i’m coveting:
I am feeling the inexplicable need to wear a colorful gemstone necklace. The issue is that the one I want is $8,000. But there are some (slightly) more reasonable versions, like this one from Effy or this one from Sarah Elise or I can just go with the fake-but-still-chic version from Chan Luu.
what i’m recommending:
One of my favorite purchases this year has been my little kodak keychain camera, which I like to call my spy cam. The photos are terrible (see my recent post from Tokyo), but it’s terribly fun to run around on vacation with this thing.
what i’m reading:
If you know me, you know that I’m a little bit obsessed with the apocalypse. I really should be a prepper. But in the meantime, it’s one of my favorite fiction genres.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is pretty much the gold standard of apocalypse horror, but I would only recommend it to people who actively want to be horrified. Handmaid’s Tale and Parable of the Sower are both feminist classics without a happy ending, while California, Severance (not that Severance), and Leave the World Behind all offer a middle-class suburban take. I loved The Dog Stars and I’m cautiously excited to see what they do with the film.
Station Eleven is one of my all-time favorite books, though I have to admit the HBO adaptation is even better than the novel (rare!). I’m a fan of Emily St John Mandel and have read almost everything in her oeuvre, but her latest, Exit Party, was a let down. I could have read 500 pages of the Paris art heist, but the rest of the book just had no soul. (But I still stand firm in my opinion that the Mandelverse will be the subject of entire college classes one day, and I’ll probably be preordering whatever book she writes next.)
what i’m bookclubbing:
We’ll be discussing American Hagwon next week in the East Village. Let me know if you want to join us!
I moved out of Astoria a decade ago - the mention of Milkflower made me smile. A great spot!