Yes, yes... YES. It’s all happening: I am starting a newsletter!!! Welcome to The Retro Report!
In this fine newsletter I will be sharing super-specific, mood-based recommendations for what to read, watch, listen to, meditate on, and obsess over. These guides will be less about what is out this week/day/minute and instead steer you toward the stuff you may have slept on. We are veering AWAY from the news cycle churn and toward what is moving, thrilling, intriguing, and great :)
You can also expect some wilder dives into whatever strange things are going on in the culture—such as: why is everyone’s face Like That? A subject for a future letter!—and other pop treats. Limited edition recaps; objectively-correct opinions about fame and its effect on the human spirit; the secret to getting your curls to turn out mermaid-gorgeous... all this and more await you!
Okay but what are we doing here REALLY
Here is a sort of MANIFESTO for the Retro Report: In These Unprecedented Times™1 , our appetite for culture, and the attention spans we need to appreciate said culture, are being pummeled into pulp by the usual powers-that-be, mostly boring tech bros who dream of living forever in a world in which no one would want to live.
You can tell that not a single one of today’s Wolfian Masters of the Universe2 has ever read The Phantom Tollbooth. Extremely bleak and embarrassing for them!
The Retro Report is for people who want to find and savor the ideas and words and sentences and images that make you say: WOW, am I glad to be alive?! In this climate? YES. I will be telling you to stare at a photograph for ten minutes at LEAST. I will be preaching the gospel of movies that make you want to chomp a cigar and go “hey, what a picture!”; the TV shows that GET it; the books that will airlift you out of the day-in-day-out drudgery of life right now and into someplace dazzling.
I will insist that your phone belongs in a different room, not just from your bed while you are sleeping but also, crucially, from your television while you are watching.3 If ANY of you are on your phone at the movies, I need you to self-select out of reading this newsletter. I am so serious. We come to this place for magic!!
Ok no offense but who are YOU (Jessica) to tell ME (…you) what to read and watch and do with MY one wild and precious life?
For the strangers in the mix—those of you who’ve been forwarded this letter by someone who knows me and wants only the best for you—hello! I’m a culture reporter. You may have read my work in the New York Times or the Washington Post or Marie Claire, or perhaps you’ve seen me on Vulture, where I’ve been covering television since everybody’s minds were blown by Netflix dropping an entire season of a new show at once. (My current recap roster: Hacks, Wednesday, and Emily in Paris.) I also contribute to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. I wrote the one about the crime-ridden streets of Bethesda, Maryland and the one about my alma mater the University of Pennsylvania’s response to the college admissions bribery scandal, among others.
But the most exciting thing in my writing life is my NOVEL! It is called RETRO and will be published next summer by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House. It’s about this struggling, out-of-work actress who gets hired as a time travel agent at a start-up that takes wealthy tourists on vacation to the past. OoooOOoooh!
People always want a book described as “like this thing meets that thing” so in the interest of giving the people what they want: I think Retro is like Party Down meets one of those great George Saunders short stories about how weird and dystopian work is. A little White Lotus, a little Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Readers of this newsletter will be the first to know when you can get your hands on it, plus the details about all sorts of other book-related events, behind-the-scenes stories and secrets, etc. etc. etc.
BACK TO BUSINESS
I want to leave you all with this video from 2012. I have probably watched it fifty times and I’m sure I will watch it fifty more!! It is the legend Patti Smith being interviewed by Christian Lund at the Louisiana Literature festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. It is called “Advice to the Young.” We are all young in here so don’t think she’s not talking to you.
I love that Lund lets her riff on this for a full six minutes. No interrupting, no rushing her along with performative-active-listening mmhmmms of assent. Just something good and true to get us going.
Do YOU have a super-specific mood-based culture recommendation request??
Or need a pop phenomenon explained? Send in your Qs to get those As!4
actually pretty precedented if you’ve ever read a history book; if you haven’t, get one while you still can!
They may have read Bonfire of the Vanities… but did they understand it?? I feel like they’re in the same lane as those guys who don’t know American Psycho is satire.
The only exception is: when you’re watching Emily in Paris. I assume you spend that show on your phone, texting your loved ones “what is going ON??” and reading my recaps.
Just reply to this email!