You are cordially invited to this week’s brew of High Tea, your dispatch of 🔥internet culture served piping hot. This week: redesigning therapy in the middle of a global pandemic, capturing the magic of human connection during quarantine and why we should all stop trying to be so productive.
Drink up 🐸☕️
oreo art: Tisha Cherry
what we’ve been sipping on: keeping it real
“April is the cruellest month”, begins the first section of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).
Ahead of his time in many ways, predicting a global pandemic 98 years in advance is, perhaps, tangential at best for the Modernist patriarch, but we can say with certainty that Eliot captured the ‘20s mood du jour, straddling both centuries simultaneously. tl;dr we’re in our feelings and they’re here to stay.
April was supposed to be the IRL breakout month for Real, the startup behind a redesigned approach to therapy and brainchild of Ariela Safira. The product idea was for a new kind of women’s mental health space, “more of a studio or sanctuary than a doctor’s office”, due to open this month in the heart of New York City’s Flatiron district.
Then coronavirus happened.
What Ariela and her team did next was nothing short of extraordinary: within a week they built Real To The People, a one-month long series of digital offerings to help you take care of your mental health.
“while we can't safely welcome you in person quite yet, we've never been more sure of the need for a trusted therapy space. So we're bringing Real to you — finding new ways over the next month to provide you with high-quality care and a chance to connect during a critical time, all free of charge.”
Suddenly, the digital backbone of Real was forced to the forefront of its product, filling the space born out of the blueprint of its brick and mortar beginnings. Real To The People are offering intimate digital group salons and events designed to help its members “find common ground and support around a core life experience”, during this critical and uncertain time. Digital mental check-ins, needed now more so than ever, are also on the cards with Real’s team of therapists - helping you to resource and prioritize your own mental health plan. Don’t miss their second round of digital salons.
As Andy Dunn said, “sometimes you have to rebuild the boat while you are at sea” - even against the current.
promises, promises👇
Can someone wake me up when this is all over? Seriously, that’d be great.
Our tip of the hat this week goes to Bram Kanstein, product builder behind Covid Promises, a single-use website inspired by this tweet from Hunter Walk - and an idea that we wish we’d been quick enough to come up with ourselves 🐸☕:
Striking in its simplicity, Covid Promises is fuelled by one question: “what do you intend to change when Covid is over?”
Babe, where should we start?!
Knuckling down on habits, behaviours and values that we’d like to change once things return to “normal”, CP gives people the opportunity to spill the beans, vent and open their hearts to a (hopeful) near future when things are feeling a whole lot brighter than they are now. Best yet, you’ll be notified when a vaccine is discovered. 🙌
Don’t you just love the internet sometimes?
talk is cheap
This will warm the cockles. In response to quarantine “isolating humans from each other” artists Danielle Baskin and Matt Hawkins, devised Quarantine Chat: a calling service that periodically matches you to another random subscriber in the hopes of recapturing some of that sweet, serendipitous human magic.
Whether the virus has affected you, or you're worried, or you live in the woods—your phone might ring and connect you to another interesting person you should meet. COVID-19 is not a lighthearted matter, but we hope this project brings people moments of joy in an otherwise dark time.
Tell your Grandma across the pond, tell your pal alone in a new city, tell yourself when you need a hot sec to recalibrate your connection meter: Quarantine Chat’s message is clear, whether in Moscow or Miami, we’re all in this together.
kettle’s on: ones to watch
🔊New Music Sundays. Yep, we’re making that a thing. Hold the front page: noughties legend and convict queen of our hearts, 👑Lindsay Lohan has bopped her way out of retirement to drop Back To Me - her first release in 12 years - and we’re already calling it for the unofficial song of the summer. Nothing says getting ready for summertime lockdown like dancing round your living room with a grubby pair of AirMaxes and LiLo (you already know) blasted loud enough to get you put on the neighbourhood watch list. Ibiza who?
🤠Kiss me thru the phone, Kombucha Girl. Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ll be well versed in all things ‘Kombucha Girl’ aka Brittany Broski, who created one of the most ubiquitous moments on the internet last year. Her creations on TikTok continue to be the gifts that keep on giving and her quarantine offerings do not disappoint. Turns out Broski has partnered with Bumble to hype their virtual date video chat feature (the devil works hard, but Bumble works harder). A match made in heaven? Well...
🎯Productivity? Stop that at once. Stop trying to make ‘Productive’ happen, it’s not going to happen. Our favorite Gen Z NYT insider, Taylor Lorenz has turned her attention to our mental health and is dishing out some serious (and well-needed) tea. You are all not just ‘WFH’; you are WFH in the middle of a pandemic. That means, dear pals, do not play into the Instagram feeds or marketing in your inboxes. You do you. If, at the end of the day, you feel totally drained from spending consecutive hours Zooming, feel free to tell Duo to do one. We’re all with you.
🎨Calling all creatives! The United Nations has launched an open competition for creatives to design informative works that accurately communicate public health messages in a bid to "flatten the curve" of the coronavirus pandemic. If you have the creative energies a plenty then head to their open brief hub to exercise your creative juices and help the UN & WHO spread critical information to new groups of people. "We are in an unprecedented situation and the normal rules no longer apply," said United Nations secretary-general António Guterres. "The creativity of the response must match the unique nature of the crisis,".
💃Caroline Calloway. That’s the tweet, no seriously, that’s *the* tweet. We’re no strangers to the international matriarch of salacious scammers here at High Tea, but CC’s (stylised: 🔁◥◤caroline calloway on 🐦) Very Online™ social presence this week really takes the biscuit. The adored internet pariah finally dropped her long-awaited Natalie response (we wrote about it in September, fyi) behind a paywall that reads: “when your best friend sells you out for $5,000 to The Cut, what do you do? Shutdown / Restart / Raise as much money as you can for the good of humanity”. A marketing genius, no less. So far, the campaign has raised $30,000 for doctors who need facemasks. So, what are you waiting for: iamcarolinecalloway.com?
Okay you’ve made it. Now, STAY THE FUCK AT HOME.
ttyl,