People Might Need This: Links & Gift Guides
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, etc.
Featuring thinkpiece wars, prepping for Avatar 2, and White Lotus spoilers.
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Literally Just Something I Think Is Funny
A woman wrote a short essay about her boyfriend being kind of a dick to her about her books doing well. The essay is pretty much fine, and also, at times, kind of funny.
In response to this, a different woman wrote a longer essay about how she hates it when women are so “woe is me” about stuff, when she, personally, never hears her woman friends complain about their boyfriends being this sucky.
I stand by neither essay and think, at times, they are both good AND bad. But I do love a “thinkpiece, reactionary thinkpiece” 1-2 punch and I hope you’ll think long and hard about how women are always being asked to be quiet or something.
A Less Serious Item (What’s In the Sauce at Hot Ones?)
By this point, if you don’t watch outright full episodes, you’ve at least seen a clip or a meme of the celebrity interview show Hot Ones. It features celebrities eating ten chicken wings in a row, each doused with an increasingly hotter hot sauce so that most of the celebrities kind of totally lose their fucking cool by the end of the interview. It’s a very likable show, and it now regularly racks up tens of millions of views (Gordon Ramsay’s episode has 113 million views). Eater did a deep dive on how the show came to be, and what it is that makes celebrities want to be on it.
The 16th episode (Episode 8 of the show’s second season) featured comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele promoting their feature-length film Keanu. The two brought their signature energies to the wing eating, with Key screaming about what felt like an MMA fight happening in his sinuses and Peele staring into the distance as if he were astral projecting. “Why are you asking the deepest, most referential shit?” demanded Peele after the fourth wing out of five and Key yelling, “I’m having a stroke!”
This Week’s Theme: Christmas Gift Jumble
If you’re still not done Christmas shopping at this point, welcome to my house. I am an infamous last-minute Christmas shopper, partially because I’m lazy and partially because my credit card statement closes on the 15th and I like to spread out my purchases.
That being said, the theme this week is gift guides that might help out my fellow last-minute shoppers. Sure, these gifts might not come on time at this point, but it’s the thought that counts!
The Strategist stays handy, with this “62 gifts for every type of best friend” list that includes filtering by price range (Under $25, Under $50, etc.). The winners for me are a “tear stick” that will help you cry on command ($11) and the cherry-shaped toilet bowl cleaner ($19).
Two Philly-themed gift guides
From the Philadelphia Citizen, who’s making the list because apparently Philly’s American Jewish History museum sells a baseball tee that says “mensch” across the front
And then from the Inquirer, their list of “Distinctly Philly” gifts includes Amoroso-branded pajamas.
If you’re made out of money, you could check out the Bon Appetit “Ultimate Gift Guide For Every Food Person You Know” where stuff is inexplicably $75 at minimum. The weirdest thing I learned from this is that you can ship Carnegie Deli cheesecake for $100 on Amazon.
The NYT gift guide I don’t think is anything special except for the fact that it has the easiest-to-digest layout of any of these guides - which, frankly? Is half the battle when it comes to a gift guide! A fake shout out to them for including a $45 Santa hat, and an actual shout out to them for including a $20 interesting-looking bottle of blueberry wine.
And then, even though it’s a year old, I am directing you to Gawker’s 12 Days of Gift Guides because I wasn’t doing this newsletter last Christmas and I missed it, goddammit! There are 12 very funny gift guides worth reading, but my starter recommendation is A Libertarian Gift Guide, which includes a radar detector and a signed poster for The Incredibles.
Politics (Doing the Work of Elizabeth Warren’s CFPB)
Vox has a little rundown for you about the “dark patterns” retailers use when you’re online shopping. Those countdown timers you see on your shopping cart are often fake, and so are those “low stock” alerts. It’s all in place to try and make you buy something right at that moment instead of waiting a little longer and maybe, I don’t know, assessing your finances. This link will probably not make you feel good, but it might make you a better, more conscious shopper! That being said, I think it’s not a bad idea to try to buy more things from actual shops instead of the internet.
A Celebrity Thinger (James Cameron Is About to Pop Off, Again)
It’s Avatar 2 release week! And I had a great time reading “‘Avatar’ and the Vanishing Myth of the Blockbuster” from the NYT. The article starts by talking about bunch of people who saw Avatar and then got mondo-depressed because they couldn’t live on Pandora. A phenomenon I was not aware of! Apparently they were all like “all I want is to live there!” and then some of them were even inspired to, like, go on a hike and try to practice gratitude. But then it moves onto its point: even though it changed a bunch of people’s lives and made the most money of any movie ever, nobody really cares about or even really remembers much about the first Avatar:
On the fifth anniversary of the film, Forbes announced, “Five Years Ago, ‘Avatar’ Grossed $2.7 Billion but Left No Pop Culture Footprint.” A few years later, Buzzfeed ran a quiz titled, “Do You Remember Anything at All About ‘Avatar’?” challenging readers to answer basic questions like, “What is the name of the male lead character in ‘Avatar’?” and “Which of these actors played the male lead?”
Even if you cannot answer these questions, chances are high you have seen “Avatar.” (According to a study by the consumer-research firm MRI-Simmons, an estimated one in five American adults saw it in theaters.) To jog your memory, a quick rundown of the plot: The year is 2154.
And at this point, I want to cut in and say that just yesterday, me and five cinema-minded friends were struggling to remember what year Avatar took place in, and someone said “I think it’s 2450.”
And then the article goes on to explain exactly how over-the-top the production of the first Avatar was:
Work on “Avatar” officially began in 2005. Cameron contracted a linguistics consultant at the University of Southern California to begin development on Na’vi — a lexicon of more than 2,800 words, drawing on the rarest structures of human language. From there, the anecdotes only got more insane: a team of botanists advising on imaginary flora; a bespoke head rig to record facial expressions; a motion-capture stage in Howard Hughes’s airplane hangar, six times larger than any seen before. Each new detail fed a tornado of hype, a low-pressure system of buzz so rapacious that it grew to encompass everything from the film’s tech — a 3-D camera system, invented by Cameron, which could mimic the spread between the human eyes — to its budget, estimates of which ranged from $237 million to $500 million. (No one could agree exactly when to start the meter — on the first day of production? With Cameron’s R.& D.? On the day of his birth?)
The kind of movie reporting that I eat right up - a certified good link.
P.S. This sheeple newsletter-writer has her tickets for Avatar 2 already, because she knows not to underestimate James Cameron, one of the most annoying men who has ever lived (DM me if you want in on which showing I’m going to the at the AMC Fashion District).
Flop! Links! - I’m Dreaming of a White… Lotus [Spoilers Ahead]
At first I thought I wanted to recap the worst of Goop’s annual holiday gift guide, but I don’t think there is anything to say about Goop that hasn’t already bounced around Gwyneth Paltrow’s echo chamber brain. So instead, we’re going to dive into some flops I experienced during my time consuming White Lotus Season 2, which just aired its finale this past Sunday!
Purposefully Portia - Throughout Season 2 of White Lotush , I’ve had to witness the general population try to drag my good sister Haley Lu Richardson and her character Portia for many alleged crimes, namely her outfit choices during her time spent meandering around the ominous beaches of Sicily. I’ve seen awful takes about this: calling for the resignation of the show’s wardrobe department, claiming nobody knew what they were doing, misfires, etc. Something about that didn’t sit right with me, because I see how you all dress, and I see your little Instagram shops with green/brown checkered sweaters. So, I did some biased investigating to prove my point (typical) and found out that, as is true for most aspects of Mike White projects, the haphazard patterns and mismatched textures are entirely by design. According to the costume designer herself, Alex Bovaird, in a recent interview with the New York Times:
Portia’s look came out of looking at Instagram influencers and how they put things together in a haphazard but accidentally cool way. There’s a girl I follow called Wuzg00d and she wears really colorful ensembles. But we decided that Portia wouldn’t always score — we’d always try and do one or two things that were a little off. If she wore a cute sundress, we’d make sure she had the wrong shoe, or too many accessories.
Also, when connecting this to her personality that you all hate so much, Ms. Bovaird had this to say:
Portia is a bit of a mess. She doesn’t have money, makes some bad choices and spends all her time on TikTok. So we wanted her clothes to reflect that.
So if any of you gen pop haters are reading this, you’re wrong! Also, you probably hate her because you’re here, reading the Flop Links. You hate to see it, but the flops we see in others are the flops we see in ourselves. Now go apologize to Haley Lu.
Fancast to Flopcast - Enough with the Season 3 Fancasts. Julia Louis Dreyfus is not going to be on White Lotus Season 3, and neither is Toni Collette, or Harry Styles, or ANY of your faves. From our sample size of two, White Lotus seasons have at least one A-list star at a time, and maybe two other rising stars at most. This show is not about celebrities, it’s about characters. I won’t claim to know how Mike White’s heart works, but as one of the six people that watched Enlightened (ed. note: Cassandra is one of the six! Great f***in’ show!), I like to think that he’s not trying to reel people into watching his shows via stunt casting; that's what the dead body reveal at the start of episode one is supposed to do. But I digress - give me more nightmare fan casts instead, like this one. Lean into the fact that you’ll never predict what this show is going to give you.
By the way, circling back to Enlightened, if you haven’t watched it yet, please do! It will fulfill that Laura Dern craving you’ve been feeling ever since you heard her voice on the phone with Michael Imperioli.
And finally, I’m going to select my Flop of the Season. No, it wasn’t Tanya, despite physically flopping out of the boat and straight to her doom. It’s actually this guy:
Thank you for your eyes and happy flopidays!
The Flop Links, as always, are brought you to by the inimitable Justin Crosby.
A Recommendation (Hopping Over the Pond)
It’s time for me to formally and officially say that I like the Gary Oldman spy show on AppleTV+. Titled Slow Horses, the show follows the aforementioned Gary Oldman playing a washed up spy who heads up a unit of spies who are bad at their jobs (they’re nicknamed slow horses!) in various spy-like entanglements. There is also, for some reason, a lot of back and forth with the second-in-charge at MI6, played by a fabulously bitchy Kristin Scott Thomas. I could hardly explain the plot of either season to you but watching it feels like (what I imagine) drinking a warm cup of tea on a chilly London day is like. And, most importantly, it features a hot guy named Jack Lowden as the star “spy who is bad at his job.”
The aforementioned hot guy Jack Lowden right after he was bad at his job on the show Slow Horses. And yes, this is Oscar-nominated actress Saoirse Ronan’s boyfriend. Shout out, girlie!
The Interactive Bits (Interact with me!)
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