the zeitgeist stockpile

how to culturally catastrophize in style

You are cordially invited to this week’s brew of High Tea, your dispatch of 🔥 internet culture served piping hot. This week: how to avoid pandemic pandemonium and get your cultural fix.  

It’s been a week: $3.6 trillion has been wiped off the stock market in its worst week since the financial crisis, weary Israelis are voting in their third election in 12 months, while the U.S. prepares for Super Tuesday and the SpaceX prototype spacecraft blows up. Yikes.

We can’t promise a one-size-fits-all cure to the seemingly global shutdown...but, like boats against the current, 🐸☕️beats on with our pop-culture deep dive. We’re sort of like the antidote: the newsletter equivalent of putting your phone in rice (and hoping for the best), you know? 

Dive in. 🐸☕️

what we’ve been sipping on: 

📖Will we ever stop talking about Anna Delvey, the fake heiress who took the glitterati of New York for a ride and then some? The answer is no...at least not until her HBO x Lena Dunham project drops (we need a date, Lena!) which will, no doubt, be scammy and salacious in equal parts. In the meantime, enjoy My Friend Anna: The True Story of a Fake Heiress by Anna’s ex-pal, Rachel Deloache Williams. The Simon & Schuster deal was worth a reported $300,000 (get your coin, sis!), which hopefully made some dent into the $62,000 bill Anna ran up in Rachel’s name. If that doesn’t quite quench your appetite for $cammers Anonymous, then prepare for the infamous Caroline Calloway’s 2020 comeback with her “antidote to shame is exposure” self-published (yep, you’ve guessed it) ‘SCAMMER’. In the words of Instagram’s favourite millennial anti-hero, “this won’t be available in stores and we’re only printing the number of copies that people buy. So! If you want it, let’s fucking go!”. We have to stan. 

🎙️If audio is more your thing, we’re singing the praises of another 🐸☕️favorite: Cat Marnell. If you loved Marnell’s NYT bestseller How To Murder Your Life, then getchu her first Audible Original audiobook Self-Tanner for the Soul: How I Ran Away to Europe and Found My Inner Glow (When Life Got Dark). Following NYC’s “quasi-reformed party girl” (Page Six, wys?) straight from the cinders of her HTMYL burnout, we follow Marnell through Europe as she hauls a suitcase full of adderall, wigs and not much else across 26 countries. In classic Cat Marnell prose (like the part where she loses both debit cards and has to sleep on a ferry deck from Italy to Albania under a rescue boat), it’s “Eat, Pray, Love for a crackhead girl” (her words, not ours). You don’t have to ask us twice: AirPods in, do not disturb on. p.s. Hi Audible! Pls sponsor us xoxo

📺When Netflix’s Love is Blind premiered on Feb 13, we were all a bit suspicious. Not least because the self-titled “experiment” had 15 men and 15 women find their potential fiancé (yes, you heard) through sound-proofed pods separated by a wall. Would someone really find true love like this? Well, it turns out, they did. Producers were expecting 1 or 2 engagements (preparing to film max. 5), but not 8! The show managed to match over half of its contestants — not too shabby. Some parts shook us: after 30 mins into the first episode we hear the first “I love you” and ngl we squirmed. Couple that with the way the contestants swag through their respective doors knowing they’re about to put on a show, gives distinctly (weird) Monsters Inc vibes, which we cannot (ironically) unsee. No spoilers here, but not everyone who says “yes” makes it to the “I do”. Insta has the answers... if you’re curious. 🐸☕️

🖥️Error 404? We don’t know her! Please enter the crypto-enabled redirect to The Wayback Machine (aka “our best bet” at a peer-to-peer internet), powered by the Internet Archive x Brave - which have been bedfellows since 2017. Say goodbye to “page not found”, where you will redirected a former version of the website which may have been lost or deleted. Brave users can even use its own token (BAT). Though there are only 9,000 tokens currently in existence (stay humble!), Decrypt says this is “proof that the current web, the one that’s driven by ads that know our every move, doesn’t have to be the web of the future. There could be a better way that’s secure, private and supported by its citizenry.” We’re sold. 

📰What’s that you say, female creators supporting other female creators? Okay, if you insist. This week we were only the slightest bit mesmerized by Pregnancy scares on a budget by writer and artist Hazel Evans. We don’t think we’ll be able to look at oat milk and dates in the same way after reading Hazel’s penny-pinching-through-poetry anecdote. Of course, like all good Brits abroad, she’s sipping tea throughout the tale. You can enjoy more of her wordsmithing and artwork here. 

🎧The year is 2020 and you’ve just awoken from a coma to a disco record from Jessie Ware. No, this is not a dream. From her fourth album, What’s Your Pleasure?, Jessie dropped its lead single Spotlight earlier this week and let's just say this: it’s a certified bop. If that wasn’t enough, the music video (directed by Jovan Todorovic) was set in Belgrade aboard the Blue Train, the private transport of former Yugoslavian leader Tito. As you do. If you still haven’t got your Jessie fix, don’t forget her critically acclaimed podcast Table Manners (direct from her own dinner table with everyone’s favourite Jewish mom, Lenny), is back for its ninth (!!) season. Listen here. 

🚀So wavy. We can’t not give a shoutout to Wave for their incredible live virtual concerts. In a time when it’s safest to be in your own home than a crowded throng, their incredible musical masterpieces are a feast for the eyes and the ears and inherently social! If you have a cheeky 6DOF VR headset, you’ll love the ‘crowd’ experience, but even the YouTube Live has all the trimmings. To date they’ve worked with 20 artists, including electronic violinist Lindsey Stirling whose electrifying performance was attended by 400,000 people across the world (chills) and RnB artist Tinashe whose avatar managed to keep up with those dance routines.

Okay, you made it. Now hurry! That bog roll won’t panic buy itself.

ttyl,

Alice & Faye

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