Issue #84: A Tutorial for Post-Gym Hair (and 6 Things of Note)

Including a seedy obsession.

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

📺 “Extrapolations” on Apple TV+: At times navel-gazey (in a “Hi, we’re Apple and we want you to know we care about Earth” sort of way) this anthology series by ‘Contagion’ writer Scott Burns imagines climate change across 33 years, beginning in 2046. The near-future is bleak, if star-studded (the cast includes Meryl Streep, Daveed Diggs, Sienna Miller, Gemma Chan, and Edward Norton), including an Elon Musk-type billionaire with enough power to determine the future of the planet, the last hump back whale in search of a mate who doesn’t exist, a dinner party at the end of the world, and a mother grappling with her child’s non-future. The show is often predictable, with trope-y characters, but carries with it a vital warning that’s worth tuning in for.

💿 “the record” by boygenius: I’m in love with the second album, which came out this Friday, by super-group boygenius. Artists Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus take turns vocalizing the kind of revelations that only come in quiet moments. Take the lyrics, “I tried, I can’t stop staring at the ceiling fan and / Spinning out about the things that haven’t happened/ Breathing in and out.” A good album for letting yourself feel.

📚 Old Flame by Molly Prentiss: On a trip to Italy, a woman is forced to grapple with the conventional ways in which she’s built her life—her corporate job, her safe friendships—when she discovers she’s pregnant. The novel is organized by parts and then short chapters that sometimes read like narrative poetry: “We were asked to follow so many rules, to be so many things. […] To be desirable while disregarding our own desire. Sometimes, just sometimes, we wanted to not have to choose how to be. We wanted to be told to feel a certain way, to be hypnotized into feeling held.” I began this novel on a flight to Guatemala for my cousin’s wedding, then finished it the next morning, sitting with a cup of coffee beside the friend I brought as my plus one, feeling a whole host of complicated feelings, but mostly immensely grateful. Very much a novel for any “Stability Types” in search of more meaning—it comes out next Tuesday, but is available for preorder here!

P.S. Curtis Sittenfeld’s latest novel, Romantic Comedy, is out today and looks great! And, ‘The Power,’ an adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel, starring Toni Colette is also out on Prime Video—I have yet to watch it, but if it’s anywhere near as good as the book, I’m looking forward to it!

My fine, grease-prone hair has been a source of frustration since I was an athlete in high school (…fourteen years ago!?). Unlike a lot of my teammates, I could never get away with not washing my hair—a trend that continued into adulthood. Well-intended suggestions to “train” my hair to go longer between washes only resulted in bad hair days. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I landed on a routine and products that allow me to sweat hard and shampoo just once every three days. Since keeping my hair long, I’ve received lots of questions about how I style it, especially given my daily, sweaty workouts. Scroll on to watch the three-day hair video diary I kept, and my full routine!

P.S. Because this routine is fairly specific to fine hair, you can also skip right past it to read about a few random things that have been on my mind lately.