Did You Know the Moon Is Getting Its Own Time Zone?
Plus, this week's letter features Barn Sour's first movie review!
Günaydın. How was your first full week of summer (or winter)? Mine was good, the kind where I cancelled my weekend plans and sent dinner party invitations to those most important to me in apology for bailing suddenly (a custom I suggest at least loosely practicing when and where you can after potentially inconveniencing others). I am not one to feel FOMO, I think because I experience a healthy level of gratification when I do go out since I don’t say yes to events that disinterest me, mostly never feel that I’m “missing out” whenever I turn an invite down or decide to stay home, and always leave social obligations before the sense of being emotionally sequestered or fatigued by them begins to rear its head. All of these habits allow for staying in to feel as good as going out. Sometimes you need a weekend away from the world, other times it’s yourself you need a vacation from, either way you should be enjoying yourself. Here’s a song to keep you company while you’re reading today’s letter.
Too Many Tabs Open
Unsure if I’ll include this in every newsletter, but Too Many Tabs Open is a section where I will share a few additional stories I’ve read and enjoyed this week, without summarizing my perspective on them. Because I really do have too many tabs open!!
Did You See This
Motivated by conversations she had with her great-aunt Evelyn over the phone, reporter Sophie Vershbow invites us to join her on a poignant exploration to learn more about her cousin Jeffrey Bomser, an AIDS activist who died in 1989 when Vershbow was just 4-days-old, and one of Evelyn’s sons (Larry, Jeffrey’s brother, also died of the disease). This made me cry. The candor Vershbow chooses not to shy away from when reminding readers of the stigmas society held against those living with HIV and AIDS, and the tenderness in her depictions of not just the ways an AIDS diagnosis reoriented a life, but the person at the center of that life too, are moving. “[…] what is love and/or what is responsibility? More importantly, what is the difference!!!!” wrote Bomser in one of his journal entries, and I believe Vershbow does a touching job of highlighting how her cousin grew to reckon with his very own quandary.
While reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven, Meghna Rao “wonder[ed] what her dreams looked like” and visited Le Guin’s website to try and find out. There, she discovered the author’s imaginative, now laid-to-rest website from earlier days of the internet and subsequently traveled through time. The experience was as vivid and rudimentary as you would expect. This was neat. I remember with significant fondness the days of HTML (did anyone else labor painstakingly over their Neopets profile?), slow-loading monitors, dial-up connections, flash games, hyperlink blue, and webpages crashing despite being more pared down than today’s internet behemoths. I wish I had experienced Le Guin’s site during its heyday, but I’m glad we have this too.
Sometimes, as a child, your parents have flights of fancy so dissimilar from how the world typically arranges itself around you that you cannot help feeling a little lost in the weeds of their conviction. Still, you go along with the notion because you (hopefully) trust your parents and also because your autonomy is not yet a muscle that can really be exercised freely, and from there whatever happens, happens. It can be hard to remember all the happenings within your lifetime since so much time passes between being a child and becoming an adult, but these events may eventually purify into an anecdote that you’re able to fashion into a party trick sometime down the road. While I can’t speak to what camp this falls into for the author, what Nicolaia Rips does with the story of the time her father made her attend Hebrew school, despite her barely knowing how to read, because he badly wanted to gain access to Gramercy Park is so… bemusing and audacious and funny while also maybe being a little sad that it reads like a friend recollecting the time they unwittingly became buddy cop to their parent.
Did you know the White House assigned NASA the task of creating a new time zone for the moon? I missed this news from back in April, but apparently, we should expect Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) to “establish time standards at and around celestial bodies other than Earth” by 2026. The woo woo woman in me momentarily reared her curious, skeptical head when I read this, but settled back down once realizing that it’s (supposedly just…) to uncoil the timekeeping logistics of traveling to the moon. I guess this means the space race really is returning.
The New York Times published a hot little (it’s actually pretty substantial) guide on how to wine, dine, and party capably this summer. Reactions to it were divisive, with some readers embracing the beliefs posited by the 43 sources and others seeing it as a stuffy, upper-crust model of how to attend your colleague’s dinner party at their brownstone and make it home to bed all before eleven — less about how to actually party. For example, it didn’t cover surviving hangovers, making sure no one swipes your shoes as they wait outside your actual friends’ small apartment, keeping your makeup intact over a night of dancing, or performing temperature checks before whipping out a vape (or has everyone moved on to Zyn?), etc. I also noticed chatter about the piece potentially being The Times’ way of courting rage bait à la The Cut, but I’m not totally convinced. I just think they had no other type of person (Ivy Getty is a great-grandchild of the Getty family dynasty, Liz Lange owns the Grey Gardens estate, and many of the interviewees are socialites) contributing to the guide other than those in the metaphorical room. What do you think? I liked the suggestions for guests to always thank the host for inviting them, no matter how delayed the gesture of gratitude, and for the host to spend at least a little time with their most socially inhibited friend, but both are pretty obvious in nature.
I’ve been recently reminiscing about a little girl I babysat as a teenager, wondering how she is today and remembering how much I enjoyed looking after her, learning symbiotically from each other. This story on the rise and fall of the babysitter as we know her today is engrossing and enlightening, though I think mostly gestures at the differences modern teens face when compared to their predecessors, rather than fully considering the landscape they navigate today. Sure, plenty of teens are overbooked with extracurriculars and don’t have time to work for the neighbor’s spare change, but many—as if reaching across generations, connecting with their latchkey parents or even their grandparents’ own elders—already spend time babysitting their younger siblings without necessarily recognizing that as work.
A terribly sad story of how Snapchat has become almost a fixture in the lives of children and teenagers, with the prevalence of its functions allegedly acting as a breeding ground for drug dealers to prey upon them, ultimately leading to tragic outcomes. I was a very young adult when Snapchat first crept onto the scene, and I never took to it — there were only so many times I could share a selfie with puppy ears before I grew bored, and I don’t have a brain that is appealed to by the gamification of communication, so my account lay dormant for several months before I deleted it. In the decade since, Snapchat has evolved into something of a dark and enticing force, seizing on its appeal to juveniles; reportedly, “92 percent of Snap’s user base is between the ages of 12 and 17.” One college-age user even remarked, “you literally can’t function without it; it’s how we talk to each other. You’d be totally lost without it.”
“These critics are, to some extent, right: many of these books do use some measure of euphemism, and they do not dwell much on questions of fetal personhood. But that doesn’t mean that they’ve been silent, or that moral questions can’t speak to the reality of women’s sexual lives at all. Instead, the fact that they are so easily overlooked by present day critics points toward a more slippery complexity.” An excellent essay that ruminates over the cultural amnesia that has built up around the abortion plot, exploring how women have long been writing and depicting and sharing stories of both the physical and moral realities of abortion, as well as the societies that not only historicized the accounts but eventually forgot them too.
“My mother, who came of age in the late ‘60s, often tells a story from the mid-’90s: Working at an ad agency, she encountered young women excited to take on the names of future husbands. What are you nuts? she remembers asking them—as in, What happened to women’s lib?” Another exceptional essay for you to read today is Leah Mandel’s reflections on The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing and where the women’s liberation movement began to ostensibly splinter from itself, published in (one of my favorite online magazines) Angel Food’s second issue. I kind of want to buy Girls Guide… after reading Mandel’s piece of writing, despite not having thought of the book in all the years it’s been since I read it at a probably too young age! I remember the wintry cover she mentions being what caught my eye. Has anyone else read Melissa Bank’s debut novel1? Should we hold a little book club and (re)acquaint ourselves with the text together?
“The most revered creature in this panoply is the Eurasian brown bear. Ursus arctos arctos. Bears have lived here for as long as anyone can remember. They appear on restaurant signs and souvenir T-shirts. The people of Trentino are said to be bear-like, which in Italian lore means shy and taciturn. Legend has it that the local saint, Romedius, rode up a mountain on a bear and founded his sanctuary there.” A man loses his life, several others are terrorized, two bears (but really three, but really more) live in political limbo, attempts are made to create a meaningful relationship between humans and their rewilding efforts as the world encroaches more and more upon the land of the wild, and apparently no municipality in Italy has yet legalized bear spray. A somber story of how one Italian village is grappling with its wildlife population and whether the strides being taken to meet everyone’s needs are sustainable. This story reminded me of the mesmerizing memoir I read a couple years ago about a French anthropologist who was nearly mauled to death by a Kamchatka brown bear in Siberia, In the Eye of the Wild2. Also, I need to know more about the guy who shoved his wife to the ground and ran away when a bear surprised him in the woods!?
The Graze
This may be more fitting for above, but I’m putting it here because I can! Those early summer days of you and your body learning once again to acclimate to the lingering sun, appetites waning, sweat dithering down your chest, drinks perspiring in your hand, the cold crunch of fruit between your teeth, and escaping into rooms awash in air conditioning always take a little getting used to. Reading this old Arthur Miller story from The New Yorker after walking home one sweltering afternoon made me eternally grateful that I have more than just patches of shade to abscond to as the day’s heat rages on.
While I have yet to see Problemista, I was a watcher and lover of both Los Espookys and My Favorite Shapes and as a result, was excited when Julio Torres’s Fantasmas premiered on HBO three weeks ago; I have, unsurprisingly, been enjoying the philosophical search for Julio’s missing gold oyster earring.
Maggie Rogers’s debut album was one that meant a lot to me at the time it was released — one of my friends and I were stumbling out of what resembles the grave but isn’t alongside each other, and our affection and support and durability and love for and belief in one another were deepening as a result of that. One of us would text the other that they were listening to Alaska or The Knife or Say It and despite being thousands of miles apart, Heard It In A Past Life made it feel like we were coming back to life in the same room. Sometime this month, the album called out to me for the first time in years, and I’ve been revisiting it with sentimental ears and an unclouded heart, from a life where my friend and I are now strangers, but the songs connect me to the love we shared and how warm it was, instead of to a time where I can hardly remember why I was so upset all those years ago.
On New Year’s Day, I downloaded Balance, a meditation app that offers users their first year free (if you would like to continue using the app beyond 365 days, you’ll then be prompted to pay an annual fee of $69.99 — insert frown emoji here) and primarily used it to supplement a different meditation service I’m subscribed to, called Open (which I love! Let me know if you want 30 days free and I’ll send you my referral link). I recently tried Balance’s sleep stretch offering for the first time and have become hooked. You select how long you’d like to stretch (anywhere between 10 to 30 minutes), choose your coach, and “release tension with gentle stretches designed to prepare your body for sleep” all from the comfort of your bed. You also never repeat the same flow twice. I know this probably seems kind of trivial, but finding stretches you can do while in bed isn’t as wide an offering as you would anticipate, plus there’s just something so nice about unwinding with your head on a pillow that I had to share this.
Okay, first of all I’m shocked to learn that Grace from The Secret Life of the American Teenager is a director? I even watched The Fallout one lazy day last year and did not put two and two together! Secondly, I’m very into the idea of a coming of age movie also being about people who are transitioning from one decade of adulthood into the next. My Old Ass looks sweet and heartfelt. I’ll be seeing it in September.
Below is my review of Janet Planet, a film I’ve previously mentioned on Barn Sour. While I don’t believe this will take away from your viewing experience, I suggest coming back to read this week’s Sour Reflections after seeing the movie if you would like to avoid mild spoilers (if you can even call them that).
Sour Reflections
We rouse awake with a drowsy, unsuspecting world, eyes unfocused as the willowy frame of Lacy (Zoe Ziegler, in her first feature film) sharpens her own vision. The sky has only just begun to reveal itself, clouds soft and tremulous as she dashes first as a shadow, then a flicker, across the screen. Lacy has gone to phone her mom. “I’m gonna kill myself,” she declares. “I said I’m going to kill myself if you don’t come get me.”
Welcome to Janet Planet, where viewers are invited to orbit titular character Janet (always-captivating Julianne Nicholson), whose home-based acupuncture studio shares the Janet Planet name, and her 11-year-old daughter. It’s the summer of 1991 and we are following the languid—sometimes tense, at times funny, often uncertain, mostly codependent—lives of a mother and her curious, watchful child who just “wants a piece of her” in Northampton, Massachusetts, as three visitors move transiently through their home (which itself acts as a character, with all its wooden, winding walls and tucked away loft and windows that look out onto the picturesque forest beyond).
A captivating filmmaking debut by director and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker, Janet Planet is the subdued and meditative and coruscating story of what it is to be Janet’s daughter and Lacy’s mom: fluctuating, hesitating, searching, loving. Baker captures assiduously the intimate relationship between a single, striving mother and her inchoate daughter who is gradually losing touch with the idolization she nurses for her sole parent; we watch this unfold subtly, not necessarily with Lacy leaning into her disillusionment, but instead trying carefully to observe how she can hold steadily the devotion she feels to her mom, and the mysteries that live apart from her understanding of Janet too.
The film is almost a love letter to the post-sixties milieu of the nineties, featuring “Free Tibet!” bumper stickers and delicate linens and classical music playing on low radios. A sort of languor hangs in the mountain air. You can imagine easily the pair shopping for carob chips and sprouted bread and filling canteens of spring water at an off-screen co-op miles down the road from their rural home. At one point during the film we learn that Janet “doesn’t like antibiotics,” and the suggestion of her homeopathic heart only makes sense — she is an acupuncturist, after all.
While the script itself is sparse, the soundscape is rich with melodies of shale crunching beneath feet, bugs chirping at nightfall, the trill of wind chimes, the soft coo of mourning doves at dawn, the tremor of summer breezes, the lilt of birdsong overheard. You get the idea. As you follow Janet and Lacy through the motions of their bedtime exchanges, you could close your eyes and think yourself lying in a field surrounded by crickets, maybe even like the one we late into the film see Janet prostrating herself in.
Often left to entertain herself (as many only children are wont to do), we watch as Lacy directs small ceramic figurines in a sort of bookshelf theatre she has staged for them in her bedroom, attending to the inanimate objects with the same intimacy she reserves for Janet. She peers at the world from the backseat of a car. She stomps through the sun-kissed forest to make it to and from taciturn piano lessons every week. She practices the keyboard from a solitary corner of the couch. She and Janet walk barefoot down a damp, graveled road to grab the early morning mail. She watches the adults that people her world and listens even when they don’t want her to. Lacy is alone and has no friends, but I’m unsure if she believes herself to be lonely.
Where Lacy is plaintive and blunt and at times overreaching in her inquisitions, Janet is demure and wistful, almost seductive in her diffidence; you believe her when she says she “could make any man fall in love with [her].” Much of our time spent with the mother-daughter duo includes closeup shots of their faces—Lacy’s speculative eyes, Janet’s chastened expressions—but when we first meet Janet it is the morning after Lacy’s declarative phone call, and she is at a remove, standing distanced from her regretful daughter as she waits for the space between the two to close in the bending grasses. Never is she glowering, though, nor stringent in the interactions she has with Lacy. The two hug and the love between them becomes visible.
If we are drawn into Janet Planet by way of Lacy, it is Janet who invites us to stay. What we learn of her is limited, but a sort of quilt is threaded together over time: she has something of a bohemian past, persistently bad taste in men, came into an inheritance that is seemingly responsible for the farmhouse and acupuncture license and laconic lifestyle she shares with her daughter. Viewers are offered the same narrow view of Janet that Lacy grows to understand she has — Janet was once a free-spirit, but is now a woman who loves gently, assuredly, the same child whose hand she lets go of in bed one night, exhaling in what looks to almost be relief as she does. She’s a mother, but she’s also a person that is uncertain of who they are.
While Janet Planet may occasionally belabor over the furnishings of its universe, you enjoy languishing in the space mother and daughter inhabit regardless. Tucked away in their quotidian world, it is only when Janet and Lacy’s lives are quartered loosely around the appearance of first Wayne (Will Patton), Janet’s aging and desultory boyfriend (whose daughter he has not even weekend custody of, Sequoia (Edie Moon Kearns), lights up Lacy’s reclusive heart) who is unimpressed by Janet’s daughter’s early arrival home from summer camp, then beautiful and enlivening and insensitive hypocrite Regina (charming Sophie Okonedo), a long-lost friend Janet is unexpectedly reunited with during a riveting puppetry show that takes place on the bucolic commune of what kinda sorta is a cult of some mystic nature, and finally Avi (convincingly portrayed by Elias Kotea), Regina’s once-lover and director of the not-really-but-actually theatrical and possibly agricultural cult, that we are made to comprehend that Lacy feels in possession of an independence she wishes to attenuate.
As Janet’s gravitational force pulls these interlopers in, we watch Lacy’s guileless attempts to reflect her mom’s more sedulous disposition. But where Janet wishes to share their small universe, Lacy cannot help wanting to shrink away from any inclusions, to close what lies between her and her mom off from outsiders, keeping safe and sacred the time mother and daughter spend alone together, at least until another intermeddler appears.
In one scene we watch as Janet, combing through Lacy’s hair, discovers a tick hidden away in her daughter’s long tresses. Here is where the relationship between mother and daughter most notably shifts: Janet strikes a match, hoping to draw the tick into the flame, but Lacy snatches it away from her mom, and lights the parasitic arachnid on fire herself.
“What are we even talking about when we talk about mothers?” Regina asks Janet, when they are under the beguiling spell of sentimentality (and a little something else too). This scene unravels in a way that I do not want to give away, but it ends on the realization that Lacy, porous and sanguine and perceptive, has been in the room the entire time the two women have been indulging in their adult anxieties, presumably absorbing the realities of Janet’s remorse, and her place within it.
Stay safe, keep hydrated, and have a fun week.
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satiating and intriguing as ever! the interview with Donald sutherland hurt my heart in "The quiet pain of ugly men" and i appreciate the consideration with which it was written. Also, the lost abortion plot piece you included was a beautiful and thought provoking read, im so thankful you put it on my radar. Happening by Annie Ernaux is one of my favorite books in recent years because i so appreciate the candor with which she spoke about abortion and have longed to read something similar and now feel curious about Emily Hahn's work. and lastly My Old Ass looks silly and fun, i just love aubrey plaza! your newsletter is such a treat <3
Mars, your too many tabs have officially been transferred to my browser! I was immediately enthralled by all five of the articles or "extras" included in this week's letter, particularly the piece on how liberals talk about children. Reminded me of how our society's relentless moralizing has led us to become more and more brutal and joyless... I do often think of this. I'm so excited to check out Angel Food, Le Guin's old website, and all the other New Yorker articles. (Yes, I have bought a subscription.) Thank you for keeping me in the loop<3