Issue #77: In the Company of Wild Women

How I got through last year (and today).

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

🎥 ‘KIMI’ on HBO Max: Steven Soderbergh’s thriller, starring Zoë Kravitz as a tech analyst who hears something disturbing through an Alexa-type app, topped countless “best of” lists last year and just started streaming on HBO. Though reticent to watch it (I am not a scary movie person), I found it impossible to look away from the creeping chill that felt like a modern take on ‘The Conversation.’ Also worth watching: ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’ on Prime Video.

🎧 “Articles of Interest: American Ivy” Podcast: I put off listening to this podcast series, which has graced nearly every “best of 2022” list, for as long as I could. I assumed that its subject matter, a history of Ivy dress, which the show describes as a subset of preppy more similar to a “villain from a John Hughes movie,” was better suited for an Ivy League or Parsons’s grad. But the podcast, hosted by Avery Trufelman, was so much more interesting than I anticipated, diving into the gender, racial, and class implications of a uniquely timeless trend (that’s apparently “back” again). Also worth listening to: This episode on wedding dresses.

📺 “Not Dead Yet,” available on Hulu and ABC: “Local Woman, 37, Ruins Own Life,” Nell Serrano (played by Gina Rodriguez) imagines the headline to her own life, when she moves back to Southern California after a failed relationship in London. Returning to the newspaper where she was once a rising star, she’s humbled to be put on “obits,” then shocked when the dead people she writes about begin visiting her. Quirky and funny-enough, it’s a sweetly compassionate show.

I really wanted to like… ‘Your Place or Mine?’ but the chemistry between Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher is non-existent and the script felt weirdly slow?

Maybe I’m not cynical enough, but I have always loved Valentine’s Day (and still do). Yes, it commercializes love, but when you strip away the mass-marketed cards and overpriced prix fixe dinners, it’s also about memories of shoeboxes filled with notes, furtive glances at your crush, the cards my dad would slip under my door before school, and—at its heart—love. Though today is my first Valentine’s Day solo in over a decade, I still feel giddy to celebrate it, intentionally and on my terms, with carefully-selected company…

Last July, after months of feeling unattuned to myself, I moved out of the house I shared with my husband into an Airbnb. I needed space to hear my own thoughts, which were constantly drowned-out by the culture I was swimming in: You are married to a truly incredible human—what more could you want? Keep your head down: This house, this life will make you happy. Have a baby. My heart sank when I recently came across a journal entry from July of 2021. It was written exactly a year before I moved out, and two months before I quit my job and began my Master’s program: