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 (Abre numa nova janela) is particularly lovely. While this piece puts into context the importance of her speaking out about relationship abuse (Abre numa nova janela).
• What if, instead of trying to manage your time (Abre numa nova janela), you set it free?
• What we owe trees. (Abre numa nova janela)
• A new drug has just been approved in the states for hot flushes. Dr Jen Gunter dissects it. (Abre numa nova janela)
• Mental health classic, Girl, Interrupted, is 30 years old (Abre numa nova janela). Thirty.
• What your therapist doesn't tell you (Abre numa nova janela).
• Is it ever time to relinquish our dreams (Abre numa nova janela)? £
• Did you ever hear a more insidious word than "self-optimization (Abre numa nova janela)" when it comes to our appearance?
• Loved this piece by Elise Loehnen on why she's grateful for her mother's radical honesty (Abre numa nova janela) when she was growing up.
• Why does Hollywood ignore older audiences (Abre numa nova janela)? (How long have you got?!)
• If you've got a spare 10-15 minutes, this is a really fascinating long read (Abre numa nova janela) about the link between author Alice Sebold and Anthony Broadwater, the man wrongly convicted of her rape.
• Got a doom pile (Abre numa nova janela)? Here's how to deal with it.
• The artists depicting the power and strangeness of breasts. (Abre numa nova janela)
• Gardening look too much like hard work? Ditch the perfectionism. (Abre numa nova janela)
• My father was awful, do I have to plan his funeral (Abre numa nova janela)?
• On the subject of awful fathers, the tech millionaire injecting himself with his son's blood in his quest for youth (Abre numa nova janela)... £
• How I got everything I ever wanted by walking away (Abre numa nova janela) from everything I ever wanted.
• Who was your idol growing up? Emma Forrest's was Neneh Cherry. (Abre numa nova janela)
(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 (Abre numa nova janela), Waterstones (Abre numa nova janela) or bookshop.org (Abre numa nova janela), 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 (Abre numa nova janela), 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.
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