Trump, Babygirl, and the Best Audiobook I've Ever Read

This week's giveaway is a copy of 'Birnam Wood' by Eleanor Catton

Dear Readers,

I was reading FT Weekend on Sunday and a piece by Enuma Okoro began by saying ‘the third Monday of January is called Blue Monday and is supposed to be the most depressing of the year.’ That made me feel a little better about how bummed I was staring down the barrel of my PhD being due in six months. I mentioned it to someone at my co-working space and we agreed it made us feel better to know others might be pushing through a similar slump. The Trump inauguration was looming. The flurry of activity I’ve seen in my local gym has begun to subside.

Then, to prep today’s edition, I tried to find the data about how and why this is apparently the saddest day of the year, and it turns out that it’s a totally bogus story made up by a UK travel company trying to sell flights. It’s especially irrelevant to those of us in the southern hemisphere where it isn’t even winter.

My stressy depressy vibes about my work started morphing into something almost like resolve once I, you know, actually did a couple of days of proper fucking work. Diagnosed a key structural issue. Re-drafted the thesis statement. Made a plan for what most immediately needed action. Thinking month-by-month was overwhelming, so I just decided to start with the few days ahead. And it reminded me of one of the sweeter pieces of advice in the ‘35 Simple Health Tips Experts Swear By’ article I shared last week:

My second-grade teacher, Ms. Edson, told us: If something feels too hard to do, it just means that the first step isn’t small enough.

Whilst we don’t actually have data about Blue Monday, and a lot of us know it’s silly to make new year’s resolutions or goals, there is still a deep inclination towards imagining bright futures for ourselves, and a feeling of friction or disappointment when those imaginings meet with quotidian reality.

So that’s my advice for this week. On the off chance you had a Blue Monday and only anecdotal evidence to show for it… just make your next step smaller.

Best wishes and happy reading,

Bri

Spoiler Alert

The next Spoiler Alert livestream is going to happen on Wednesday 19 February and we’re doing Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton and Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik. Which of these questions do you think we should discuss in the final ten minutes?

You can watch previous Spoiler Alerts here. If you’ve got a book you think would make for excellent conversation then drop it in the chat and if you’ve got opinions on these books send me a voice memo here so I can play it and we can all respond and discuss.

Good News

1. On the second day of the ceasefire in Gaza the UN says 915 aid trucks got in. As the BBC report, these negotiations for peace are ‘the most significant breakthrough in 15 months’. This first stage will last six weeks, with hostages and prisoners being released, and Palestinians can begin returning to see what is left of their homes. ‘Detailed negotiations’ for the second and third stages will begin on the 16th day of the ceasefire, but they’re supposed to be a ‘permanent’ end to the invasion. Let’s hope it holds.

   gazamedicvoices

   

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2. As someone who’s never downloaded TikTok, I didn’t particularly care about the risk of it being banned in the USA. (It did seem like a dodgy PR stunt that they took themselves down and then reinstated themselves up, thanking the new president by name, in a single day.) But then I read this piece by

   Taylor Lorenz
   in
   User Mag
   in which she writes ‘Since 2020, TikTok has served as a major hub for progressive speech and activism. The ban will deplatform thousands of progressive content creators and skew online discourse toward conservative ideologies. It will consolidate media influence within right leaning platforms like Meta and X. Over time, I believe this reconfiguration will permanently alter the political landscape of the creator economy.’ Seeing Musk and Zuckerberg at the inauguration made me hope—purely for healthy political discourse if nothing else—that Trump does allow it to remain functional somehow.

3. The South Koreans actually got rid of their (wannabe) authoritarian ruler. In December President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in an attempt to seize power and crush dissenters by banning political activities. It took two tries for enough MPs to vote to impeach him, but now it is done. As Youngmi Kim writes in the Guardian, ‘Watching Yoon appear at his impeachment hearing today, these may appear to be very dark days for democracy. But in reality, these events should give Koreans hope… Thanks to an overwhelming display of popular defiance of presidential actions and a display of democratic culture across many institutions, South Korean democracy has thus far shown remarkable resilience.’

Bad News

1. It was difficult to know where to point to in amongst the first 48 hours of the second Trump presidency. The New York Times listed the three most important executive orders (amongst the 200ish) he signed as soon as he got in: he’s withdrawn America from the Paris Agreement; he’s winding back intentions and investments for wind power; and his order on ‘unleashing American energy’ ‘would not just end climate regulations, but would also make sure no future administration could ever curb dangerous emissions from fossil fuels.’ Trump also pardoned the Capitol Hill fuckwits, is trying to end birthright citizenship, and websites with information for women seeking reproductive healthcare are going dark. As I said last year… scones in a pond.

2. Elon Musk did a what looks like a Nazi salute and he denies it but he has thrown his generous ($) and influential (Twitter/X) support behind Germany’s far-right. Meanwhile here in Australia the Sydney Morning Herald report a synagogue and a daycare have been set on fire bringing the total number of recent antisemitic hate crimes up to nine. There’s talk about a legislative response, but as the NSW Council for Civil Liberties says, ‘You cannot arrest your way into social cohesion.’

   

3. I’ve never actually been to the Great Barrier Reef. Have you? Because now I feel like I’d better go see it before it all dies. As the Guardian Australia reported today, ‘More than 40% of individual corals monitored around a Great Barrier Reef island were killed last year in the most widespread coral bleaching outbreak to hit the reef system.’ It’s heat stress combined with disease. One scientist called it a ‘graveyard of corals’. March is usually the peak month for heat stress on the reef and it’s not even February yet. See also: cruise ships dumping toxins. See also: Dutton says he’ll defund the Environmental Defenders Office if he’s elected.

Good Reviews

1. I had a hankering for Indonesian cuisine on the weekend and made meals from two very great and very different cookbooks. Coconut and Sambal: Recipes from My Indonesian Kitchen by Lara Lee is on the more approachable side of things, whereas Paon: Real Balinese Cooking by Tjok Maya Kerthyasa and I Wayan Kresna Yasa is for the gourmand with more than a passing interest in culinary history and food culture. (I made my own sambal which I then used to slow roast eggplant, plus a tempeh stirfry.) Either book would make an excellent gift if pitched to the right chef. Paon would even be great for someone travelling to Bali, actually—it’s full of history and gorgeous photos and there’s a whole section of food specifically for rituals and celebrations. And follow Lara Lee on Instagram here—I want her new one, A Splash of Soy: Everyday Food from Asia!

   

2. In making an effort to better understand TikTok, this New Yorker article posed an interesting question: ‘The billionaire Frank McCourt is launching a “people’s bid” to buy the app, replace its addictive algorithm, and give users greater control of their data. Is it a publicity stunt or a sincere attempt to reform the digital age?’ Skim past the first three pars about McCourt himself, and just get to the implications for the app and democracy, and the history of attempts to regulate it. ‘Thirty-nine per cent of users under thirty told Pew that they regularly got their news from the app.’ It’s a good combo-read with the Taylor Lorenz piece I mentioned in the news.

3. I saw my friend Caoilinn Hughes recommend Trust by Hernan Diaz way back in 2021 and then I bought the audiobook when it made the Booker longlist in 2022 but was so burned by the terrible audiobook of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin that I didn’t do any other audio fiction for over a year. Anyways, something clicked in January and I began listening to Trust on my morning walks, and holy fucking shit it has blown me away. The less you know about it the better; I’m glad I didn’t have the concept explained to me in any great detail before going in. The themes are money and myth-making, and how the two converge. How can I sell this to you without telling you what happens? Imagine walking through a garden of four concentric stages. The first is a bombastic riot of flowers and colours and easily hooks you in. But the second complicates the first, with too much shade and hidden spots that make you second-guess what you recall from the first. Step through blinking into the honest and bright third, full of clearly planted hedges with hard edges and a totally different tone. Then finally, the fourth… Diaz’s gift to the reader is that he makes us feel like we’ve earned the truth and brilliance of that final, tight inner sanctum. The voice actors bring Trust to life, enriching how we experience the difference between the four layers. Easily the best audiobook I have ever listened to.

   

This Week’s Group Chat Hot Topic: We Need to Talk about Babygirl, Neil Gaiman, and BDSM in Pop Culture

Note: For years now I’ve given away my weekly bad reviews, essays, rants, and gripes for free. The trouble is, News & Reviews is no longer a fun little sneaky thing. Substack won’t let me cull low-engagement subscribers so we’ve hit 11,000 readers and despite my efforts, that number keeps growing. I was also inspired by this recent interview between

Pandora Sykes

and

Tina Brown

in which Brown says ‘The irony is that you need to be really good to do the 800 word pieces.’ People like regular editions because they’re insightful but also snappy. Trust me: it only looks easy. So! I’ve swapped the order and I’ll keep the good reviews up high above the paywall but I’m putting the bad reviews/juicy stuff and the giveaways down below. I’m experimenting with what to call it but the vibe is definitely ‘group chat hot topic’. As always, if you’re high enthusiasm and low funds, just reply to an email and I’ll comp you for six months. :)

I was a Babygirl sceptic for a few reasons. I’ve seen most of the erotic thrillers the director, Halina Reijn, was inspired by, and (as Reijn herself acknowledges) they’re all shit to women. In August 2023 I wrote about how bad the reboot of Fatal Attraction was. The ‘crazy woman’ thing was always cruel and damaging, but yet another bunny boiler would be cruel and damaging and tired.

Then there’s this recurring theme in the culture of successful and beautiful women secretly hating themselves. See also: trauma plot. There’s a kernel of truth hidden somewhere in there because women are genuinely conditioned to hate themselves. But it, too, is tired. And all these so-called ‘older women’ we’re celebrating now—Demi Moore and Nicole Kidman and even Miranda July—the homogeneity is striking and in supremely obvious irony they’re not actually allowed to ‘look their age’.

It felt risky (in a bad way) to throw BDSM into this mix. At some point between the second and third Sally Rooney books I got tired of the repetition of the Waif Seeking Submission.

On top of all this, in real life the so-called ‘kinky sex gone wrong’ trope sees men avoid culpability for rapes and murders. Teenagers are getting strangled during sex younger and younger. I’m never gonna yuck someone’s yum, but it seemed no mere coincidence that the biggest cinematic release of the new year coincided with the biggest #MeToo story of the year and they both revolve around sub-dom relations. The online headline for Vulture’s cover story about the latest round of allegations against Neil Gaiman was ‘There is No Safe Word’.

So how did I walk into the Babygirl cinema a sceptic and walk out a total convert?