Issue #13: A Gift Guide for Real Life

When I say these are the best... ✨

Morning Person is a weekly newsletter packed with obsessively-curated recommendations and ideas—let’s get to it!

🎧 Adele’s ‘30’: I mean, what else would I recommend?? All of the graphics below were made while jamming to this album—I can’t get enough of “Oh My God,” love that Adele’s friends sing background vocals on “Hold On,” and admire her honesty about mental health battles (rumor has it, she could only do two takes of “To Be Loved”).

🎥 Love Hard: I’m not a huge Christmas movie gal, but so enjoyed this new Netflix romantic comedy, which is ripe with nods to holiday classics like Love, Actually and Die Hard, hence the name. In it, Natalie flies cross-country from L.A. to Lake Placid, N.Y. for a dating app match, only to realize she’s been catfished by someone she finds far less attractive than the super-hunk in the profile. A what-could-go-wrong plot unfurls when she agrees to pretend to be her match’s girlfriend for a week in exchange for him setting her up with the “real” guy in the photos—a childhood friend of his. Also loved the Heather McMahan cameo!

📚 I Hope This Finds You Well by Kate Baer: Baer’s latest collection of poems, after her bestselling What Kind of Woman, is brilliant. In it, she takes messages she’s received from trolls and creates erasure poetry—eliminating select words to reveal a poem. For example, when a stranger feels the need to reprimand Baer for her lifestyle choices because his girlfriend “loves to exercise,” Baer turns it into, “Even though/ you will / make / women lose / Their / love / I will / bring them to / courage / I will bring / them / home.” Every one of her poems feels nourishing, like a balm.

I used to dread putting together gift guides. Every October, I’d brainstorm unique spins on gifts by personality (Your most outdoorsy friend! Your dog-loving mother figure!), then begin the arduous process of sourcing upwards of 150 items, while prioritizing affiliate links. The irony was that the gift guides I curated never reflected the way I actually give gifts: