À la carte (August 26, 2024)

Entertainment for the energetically-depleted

I don’t know if it is iron deficiency, the fact that I’ve been breastfeeding for a year, or the psychic toll of being in the midst of a lot of life changes (stay tuned!!), but I have been so so tired lately. I find myself wanting to be horizontal in every spare moment that I have. Often this looks like me lying on the living room floor with my head in the dog bed as my daughter bangs coasters together next to me. For the last month or so, my engagement with The Culture has been passive—a way to be entertained while I am horizontal and nudging my husband to not stop scratching my back. Here is some of what I have been (passively) consuming.

A show

Just in time for the release of the third season, my husband and I started watching Industry, the HBO/BBC co-production following the lives of recent college grads at a prestigious London investment bank. We watched the eight-episode first season in approximately three nights, which is pretty impressive for two new parents who usually go to bed at 9 pm. I never watched HBO’s Euphoria, but Industry is what I understood Euphoria to be about—Gen Zers partying and doing drugs and f*Cking each other—but in finance and with more money. It’s so stressful!! No one is getting enough sleep!! In between the Bright Lights Big City-style party scenes, the youth are under impossible pressure to do whatever it is investment bankers do (the show has not clarified this for me), enduring sexual harassment and straight-up harassment. The show makes me very stressed; my nervous system has not forgotten what it feels like to have dinner plans, only to be assigned an urgent task at 5 pm. But the adrenaline prevents me from falling asleep on the couch, which is how we’ve blazed through season one so quickly. As I waste away in post-pandemic California wfh athleisure, there’s also something nostalgic for me the world of Industry, a world in which people still clip clop through the City in heels and go out after work in suits—something that brings me back to weeknights at Wilfie & Nell on West 4th, surrounded by boys dressed up as men who work in fi-NANCE.

A sprawling novel

Taffy Brodesser-Ackner’s Long Island Compromise is based off the true story of a Long Island millionaire who was kidnapped from his suburban driveway in the 1980s. I haven’t read a sprawling polyphonic novel in a while and it will probably be a couple of years before I find one I enjoy as much! Though it’s undoubtedly a Jewish-American satire (I laughed out loud every few pages), Long Island Compromise doesn’t sacrifice plot or emotional heft for laughs. It’s less Roth and more like Jill Soloway’s Transparent, the Amazon show which follows the three grown Pfefferman children of another Jewish-American family as they navigate the ripple effects of their childhood traumas through adulthood in a wealthy enclave opposite coast. But rather than a trans parent, the three Fletcher children—heirs to a Styrofoam manufacturing fortune that is taking its dying breaths— experienced the trauma of a kidnapped parent. It’s an ambitious novel—a family novel, a class novel, a Jewish novel, and in sum, an American novel—and it’s fabulous. Read on a beach, read on a plane, read until 11 pm while your spouse is already asleep next to you.

A podcast on a tv show

I watched America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders in the haze of a stomach bug last month. I had sooo many thoughts that didn’t make it to the page, but they didn’t have to, because

Anne Helen Petersen

put out an episode of

The Culture Study Podcast

that dove into the intersection of DCC & evangelical Christian culture for me. There are so many more DCC stories that I want to see—where are the DCCs who have needed discrete abortions? Where are the Latina and Asian-American DCCs??? Have there been any efforts to unionize? This is a little piece of the culture that I’ll be keeping my eyes on.

A DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION IN CHICAGO

I momentarily forgot about my exhaustion last week, distracted as I was by the groundswell of hope I felt coming out of Chicago. We still have a lot to do to get OUR FIRST WOMAN PRESIDENT elected in November, and Trump keeps getting scarier, but I wasn’t prepared for how emotional I would feel during Kamala’s acceptance speech. Usually it is the Obamas who make me cry, but last week, it was Kamala saying the word ABORTION that got me¹. Something about her saying a word that Biden has for so many decades refused to utter signified the enormity of what it would mean to have a woman in charge, and how I can’t possibly pretend to my daughter that we have gender equality in a world in which a woman has never been president of the United States.

1. (Let’s not talk about her use of the word lethal, in reference to the U.S. military, because that made my skin crawl.)