Issue #114: A Very Cozy Halloween and a Rainy Day Granola Recipe

Plus all the recs from Claire and Emma.

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

📺 “Fellow Travelers” on Paramount+ and Showtime: At an election party for McCarthy (Joseph, not Kevin—this being the 1950s), a D.C. fixer spots a young man at a bar, ordering milk. Days later, they begin an affair that spans decades (the sex, by the way, is incredibly steamy and graphic). The scene, like the rest of the show, is a bit on-the-nose, with the unsubtle foreshadowing to McCarthy’s demagogic, fear-and-hate-mongering Lavender and Red Scares, and the childish naïveté of a man who still drinks milk, about to come into his own in D.C. That being said, “Fellow Travelers,” based on the bestselling novel of the same name, is intriguing and beset with mystery, thanks to the jumps between the ‘50s and ‘80s (if you can get past Alison Williams’s, who plays a pitch-perfect political wife, fake neck wrinkles).

🎧 Three Scary (or Not!) Podcasts: I’ve been known to read the Wikipedia page of scary movies, to eliminate as many frights as possible, which is why I love the concept of the podcast “Too Scary, Didn’t Watch,” in which a friend recaps horror movies for her two best friends who are too freaked to watch. In “Ghost Story,” journalist Tristan Redman explores the history of the ghost who purportedly lives in his childhood home. BBC podcast “Witch” explores what it means to be a witch, spells and all, today.

🎥 ‘Pain Hustlers’ on Netflix: MLM, but make it pharmaceuticals. In this new Netflix film, Emily Blunt stars as a single mother desperate to make ends meet when she’s hired by Chris Evans as a drug rep, hawking a fictional but based-on-a-true-story drug. It’s almost funny in the way over-the-top displays of greed can be, while at the same time it’s definitely not, drawing from the lies reps told to sell fentanyl (“It’s safer than aspirin!”).

A few more recs… I’m intrigued by the premise of the Netflix show “Bodies,” recommended on the Substack

OKAY MCKAY

: “a dead, naked body keeps turning up in the exact same alleyway in London decades apart, and it’s up to the chief inspectors of that time period to figure out who this man is and why this is happening.” And, when you’re finished binge-listening to the new ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version),’ (currently playing “Now That We Don’t Talk” on repeat) The Mountain Goats have a new album!

P.S. This issue is a long one, so you may need to hit “expand” or open it in your browser.

Though I don’t go big on costumes, I’ve always loved Halloween, unabashedly in every iteration: My two best friends and I Trick-or-Treated well past the appropriate age of asking strangers for candy, I hosted scary movie nights in high school, donned parkas over skin-baring costumes in college, and, more recently, have come to enjoy the excuse for a cozy night in with friends, watching movies and handing out candy. In thinking about a Halloween Issue, I had so many ideas, I decided to pack them all in. Read on for an interview with two of my favorite pop culture aficionadas, a recipe for pumpkin spice granola, last-minute costumes, and seasonal reads…

A little note before we get into things… I wanted to let you know that there are still a few spots available for our event in L.A. I am so excited to meet you all! I’m organizing it with Substack and reader Percia Safar who came up with the idea! She said, “I love all the topics you cover in Morning Person, from book recs to living alone to what it means to be a wild woman. I thought it would be fun to meet other women who are thinking about similar things!" Let’s meet! x

It’s a testament to

Claire Fallon

and

Emma Gray

that, in spite of watching almost no reality TV, I still listen to recaps on their podcast Love to See It and religiously read their pop culture newsletter,

Rich Text

. I invited them to share some of their quintessential fall recommendations and obsessions, like the boots Claire loves so much she bought them twice: