What's got my attention this week
Things to read, watch and listen to this weekend
Tina Turner died aged 83. Truly a legend. Rest in power.
The Shift is moving home, so this is the last Friday round-up you'll receive from this platform. From next week, you'll find us over on Substack. If you're an existing member I'll do the moving for you, if not...
SCROLLING
• The internet is rightly awash with obituaries of Tina Turner, but this remembrance by Mad Max director George Miller (Opens in a new window) is particularly lovely. While this piece puts into context the importance of her speaking out about relationship abuse (Opens in a new window).
• What if, instead of trying to manage your time (Opens in a new window), you set it free?
• What we owe trees. (Opens in a new window)
• A new drug has just been approved in the states for hot flushes. Dr Jen Gunter dissects it. (Opens in a new window)
• Mental health classic, Girl, Interrupted, is 30 years old (Opens in a new window). Thirty.
• What your therapist doesn't tell you (Opens in a new window).
• Is it ever time to relinquish our dreams (Opens in a new window)? £
• Did you ever hear a more insidious word than "self-optimization (Opens in a new window)" when it comes to our appearance?
• Loved this piece by Elise Loehnen on why she's grateful for her mother's radical honesty (Opens in a new window) when she was growing up.
• Why does Hollywood ignore older audiences (Opens in a new window)? (How long have you got?!)
• If you've got a spare 10-15 minutes, this is a really fascinating long read (Opens in a new window) about the link between author Alice Sebold and Anthony Broadwater, the man wrongly convicted of her rape.
• Got a doom pile (Opens in a new window)? Here's how to deal with it.
• The artists depicting the power and strangeness of breasts. (Opens in a new window)
• Gardening look too much like hard work? Ditch the perfectionism. (Opens in a new window)
• My father was awful, do I have to plan his funeral (Opens in a new window)?
• On the subject of awful fathers, the tech millionaire injecting himself with his son's blood in his quest for youth (Opens in a new window)... £
• How I got everything I ever wanted by walking away (Opens in a new window) from everything I ever wanted.
• Who was your idol growing up? Emma Forrest's was Neneh Cherry. (Opens in a new window)
(A note about the links: some links are behind a paywall, but almost all can be accessed free by registering your email address. Those that can't are marked £.)
READING
Get ready, because you're going to be seeing a lot of this distinctive book cover* over coming weeks/months. Because Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang is destined to be a literary phenomenon. Athena Liu is a literary darling. June Hayward isn't. But when Athena dies in a freak accident and her new manuscript "somehow" ends up in June's bag, she just can't resist the temptation to pass it off as her own. Her newfound bestsellerdom is addictive but, as the frenzy abates, it becomes clear she's not the only one who knows the truth behind her smash hit. A fast and furious look at call-out culture, social media shaming, appropriation and identity politics, with more than a side-eye to the publishing industry, this is like living through a 300-page twitter pile-on. In a good way! As well as being properly page-turning it has a lot to say about contemporary culture that I'm pretty sure some people won't like hearing. This is the right book at the right time, with a killer plot, best read it before you get sick of people telling you to!
(*Cover designers don't often get a lot of attention, but look at this and tell me this designer isn't a genius!)
• You can buy it from amazon (Opens in a new window), Waterstones (Opens in a new window) or bookshop.org (Opens in a new window), or your local indie.
WATCHING
The final episode of Succession, Sky Atlantic and Now, Monday
Who will ultimately succeed Logan, will Shiv and Tom get back together "for the sake of the baby", will Ken's inner Logan finally subsume him, did Roman successfully pull-off "suicide by protestor", did Marsha actually get those two board votes that could change everything, could Logan have bought a bigger crypt? So many questions and only one 90-minute episode to tie them up! I and other Succession stans will be spending the bank holiday weekend obsessively watching all four seasons to see what clues we missed before the big finale.
• If you can't think of anything worse, why not catch up with Maryland on ITVx/player. Produced by the always excellent Suranne Jones, it stars Jones and Eve Best as sisters-at-odds who travel to the Isle of Man when their mother dies mysteriously. (The first mystery being what the hell was she doing there.) In the course of uncovering the truth about their mother's death (and life), they discover a whole host of unspokens about themselves.
LISTENING
• To The Myth of Full Recovery (Opens in a new window), an episode of the podcast about diet culture from Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith. This particular episode is about living with eating disorders, but the myth of full recovery applies to pretty much everything.
• And mainlining a Tina Turner playlist on Spotify. Of course.
Meanwhile, this week on The Shift podcast...
... I caught up with comedian and writer Josie Long to discuss being diagnosed with ADHD in her 40s (this is something I'm hearing again and again from women I speak to for the podcast), the impact of pregnancy and perimeno on her ADHD, the macho comedy industry, living in a two-comedian household and why she hopes she's still performing standup at 80.
If you've got this far, thank you! Make sure you don't miss out on future newsletters by signing up to The Shift With Sam Baker at our new home on Subtack.
