❤️🔥 13 things I'm thinking about this week (#1)
Hi, I decided to share some things I find interesting on a weekly basis outside of the longer form ~monthly posts. This will be the start of a new series that I’ll try to post on a not particularly precise (sorry) schedule each week. Don’t ask why I chose the number 13. I don’t know. Some weeks there will be more or less things. Remember: nothing’s promised.
AI partner provider Replika AI’s ERP (erotic roleplay) ban. Basically, Replika banned sexting between humans and their AIs (called Replikas). Users have responded with varying levels of outrage and grief, see here. AI-human relationships are especially interesting to me, so I’ve been spending a lot of time following this ordeal. For the very curious, here’s a more detailed timeline of events.
Girl by Jamaica Kincaid. A didactic lesson on womanhood and how surveilling the experience of coming into it is. Published in 1978, still feels relevant.
Natural form of estrogen Estetrol1. Estetrol is a natural estrogen (compared to Ethinylestradiol, which is synthetic). There’s some promise that estetrol-based birth control and HRT may be safer and have less side effects than traditional methods. Early trials have shown some promising results regarding safety and efficacy.
Lip oil. Okay, I love makeup but something I love more than makeup itself is evaluating whether the latest craze is bullshit/marketing or legit. Lip oils have been popping up lately with prices comparable (or higher) to their lip gloss equivalents despite being super diluted. A cosmetic chemist sheds light on the truth and breaks the formula of Dior’s $40 lip oil down here.
Olla, written and directed by Ariane Labed. This is a bittersweet short film about a Ukrainian woman, Olla, in a purely transactional (think mail-order bride) relationship with a French man who lives with his mother. An exploration of sex as a means of survival.
On Shulamith Firestone. A collection of essays by various women about their relationship with Shulamith and/or her writing. I particularly liked Jennifer Szalai’s discussion of Joan Didion’s critique2 of the Dialectic of Sex and the women’s liberation movement of the 70s.
Heterosexual conceptions of love. I’ve been reading Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals3 lately and it’s got me thinking about how a man’s (or, similarly, a woman’s) perception of the opposite sex informs their understanding of love.
Phoebe Unwin’s paintings. Hauntingly beautiful abstract paintings. Like photographic artifacts on film rolls that elicit nostalgia.
Couplets: A Love Story. The best book I’ve read so far this year, a love story written entirely in couplets. Simultaneously sad, sexy, poetic and sweet.
This interview with Chris Kraus: And my problem was, as an artist, I had not been heard. And I didn't want to believe that the problem was my fault. I thought it was cultural. You know, like Deleuze says, life is not personal. Because if success is culturally determined then so is failure. And it seemed to me that a lot of women who were working in a vein similar to mine had also experienced this “failure.” So what drove me on was trying to figure out why there was no position in the culture for female outsiders. You know, singular men are geniuses. Singular women are just “quirky”.
The Ozempic craze and its implications. Here’s the viral Cut article and here’s a podcast.
Lots of Twitter discussion about this piece yesterday. Definitely interesting to me as someone who viewed myself as a reader and writer even in high school, but did not consider majoring in English for many of the reasons cited in this piece, including the inability to make money without going to grad school and a sense of disconnection from what is valued in the modern world.
A really good nonfiction book about five literary marriages. Elizabeth Hardwick: “It's been my experience that nobody holds a man's brutality to his wife against him.”