March 4, 2021

Last weekend my dad told me he’d gladly be my newsletter editor, before pointing out two typos in that week’s dispatch. It’s a tempting offer, but isn’t telling your kids all the ways they’re screwing up already a parent’s job? Besides DAD: I have no payroll to to put you on. ;)

1.

Speaking of family, this weekend is my brother’s birthday. We tease each other constantly for getting older, how we’re becoming our parents in curious ways, and reminiscing about childhood and our youth has become an increasingly regular means of how we relate. I especially thought of him with this one: nearly three decades after the debut season of MTV’s epochal Real World series, those same “seven strangers…picked to live in a loft,” are reuniting—in the same loft!—for The Real World Homecoming. The first episode airs today on Paramount+, and from what I’ve read, we can expect less twentysomething, angst-fueled tension, and a lot more peace, love and understanding. And Eric Nies will be there, but not physically.?.? Cue up Dua Lipa’s “Future Nostalgia.”

2.

There were a lot of fascinating and sharply-written stories crammed into the most recent style-themed issue of New York Magazine, from Stella Bugbee’s taxonomy of New York merch (she dubs it “Zizmorcore”), and the citizens embracing the trend, to Matthew Schneier’s profile on Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s sublime and prohibitively-priced label, The Row, and its resilence in these pandemic times. What stood out to me the most, especially for its urgency, was Kathleen Hou's personal essay on being Asian in America. There’s been a shocking tide of anti-Asian hate crimes across the country in the last year, some of which can be attributed to falsely-displaced blame around the pandemic. What Hou spells out through her own childhood memories, however, is that these undercurrents of ugliness and hostility have always existed. And they won’t disappear when Covid-19 does.

3.

A simple namecheck by Billie Eilish sent me on a deep-dive mission to learn more, and listen to pretty much everything by the late actress-singer Julie London. Eilish praised her rendition of “I’m In the Mood For Love,” but there’s also “Sway,” “Fly Me To the Moon,” “As Time Goes By” and the sultry “Cry Me A River,” which predated Justin Timberlake’s song bearing the same name by several decades. Trust me, London’s version is just better (and devoid of all the icky Britney intimations.).

4.

I have long legs, and rubbing moisturizer onto my gnarly winter feet is always a clumsy fiasco. My crooked knee gets in my face, and I feel like I always end up awkwardly folding myself into parts to be able to assess my soles. So this lovely-scented stuff is a newly-discovered revelation. I spray, I put on socks, I’m done. Using it made me wonder: why isn’t there a moisturizing spray for the rest of the bod? Well, there IS. (No way. Yes ouai.)

5.

Modern comforts: These grown-up tater tots are a clever and delightfully unexpected way to use up leftover mashed potatoes. And they go terrifically with Negronis.

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