Happy Monday. We know everyone’s wondering about how serious we should be taking coronavirus. We cannot answer that, but the CDC says 40-60% of the world is going to be infected. Pretty intense!
If you want pandemic related recommendations, please check out this Vulture article.
This week, however, we’re giving you: Things to distract you from coronavirus.
(With a smidge of corona-related content and memes, because that’s how we millennials/gen z-ers deal with scary things beyond our control.)
TELEVISION
Dave
I love Lil Dicky (Lizzy and I have spent many hours watching his Youtube videos like this one and this one), and now he has his own scripted show. Created by Dave Burd (Lil Dicky) and Jeff Schaffer (Curb Your Enthusiasm, The League, Seinfeld), Dave has original raps, ridiculous storylines, and celeb cameos.
Through FXX but available for streaming on HULU.
-JW
John Mulaney sketches on SNL
Speaking of men we actually like, SNL two weeks ago continued their now classic Mulaney-in-gross-NYC-institutions sketches.
Watch airport sushi
Watch bodega bathroom
Watch diner lobster
-JW
Justin Bieber: Seasons
If, like me, you have a particular fascination with the personal lives of celebrities (a trait that gives my boyfriend pause) or if you’ve ever wondered to yourself “Does Hailey Baldwin have a personality,” then Seasons, Justin Bieber’s new YouTube documentary series, is for you! The series is ten 15-minute episodes and pretty much only features Justin, Hailey, his manager Scooter Braun, his other manager Allison Kaye, his weird friend and maybe manager(?) Ryan Good, and Poo Bear, his producer. POO BEAR! If you take nothing else away from this newsletter, please let it be that.
BONUS CONTENT: A 15-minute extremely detailed account of Hailey and Justin’s whole relationship, which I watched in its entirety.
Seasons is streaming for free on YouTube
-LR
Gossip Girl
Re-watched some of Season 1 this weekend. An oldie, but a goodie.
Netflix
-LR
FILM
I haven’t watched anything new so I’ll just re-plug the One Direction documentary here! A masterpiece. Streaming on IMDb.
-LR
BOOKS
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
I read this one a while ago, but it’s my rec if you need to be completely distracted from your surroundings. Even too distracted - you may like me stay up until 3am on a work night reading it. Bad Blood is the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and I promise you, if you haven’t read this book then you HAVE NOT had enough of this story.
-JW
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
If you need to feel a little hope for humanity!
-LR
PODCASTS
Call Her Daddy
I’m not proud of this rec, but if you’re trying to clear all thoughts and turn your brain off completely, this will do it. Hilarious and entertaining at its best, raunchy and pretty uncomf at its worst. Be careful about who you listen with!
-LR
I felt like I really bonded with Lizzy’s boyfriend when we all listened to this together on a road trip.
-JW
ARTICLES WE’RE READING
Gunnison, Colorado: the town that dodged the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic
Just some Coloradans bein’ silly.
The Tyranny of Terrazzo: Will the millennial aesthetic ever end?
A weirdly intellectual account of millennial aesthetic:
“No account of the millennial aesthetic could fail to address pink: For the better part of a decade, millennial pink bedeviled anyone a color could bedevil. When Facebook rolled out a corporate rebrand last fall, the lead image in the press release showed the new logo — breezily spaced sans serif — in a muted shade somewhere on the ham-to-salmon spectrum. Samuel keeps wondering when people will get sick of the color, but they don’t; almost every client asks for pink. She thinks this is because it’s soothing. They want houses that remind them of vacations, suggest Mediterranean idylls.
“It kind of feels like a binky,” Deborah Needleman, the former editor of T,WSJ., and Domino, says of millennial interiors. (Boob-print pillows and bath mats are perhaps the most literal expression of a general tendency toward the comforts of babyhood.) Needleman sees not a trip to Greece but something more like childproofing. “It’s like it has no edge or sense of humor or sense of mystery,” she says. “There’s no weirdness. There’s nothing that clashes. It is very controlled.””
-JW
THINGS THAT MADE US ANXIOUS THIS WEEK
Did you know hand sanitizer expires? Because I didn’t! Here’s what a random Women’s Health article had to say:
Touching produce today at Trader Joe’s and thinking of all the people who have picked up and put down that same piece of produce I put in my basket and now I definitely have coronavirus.
-LR
Pretty much everything? If I visit my grandma, am I going to kill her accidentally? Should I be making out with my boyfriend considering I don’t know every single person he’s coming in contact with? Am I part of the problem with my hysteria? Is hysteria an inherently sexist word? Should I remove it from my vocabulary?
Public gyms.
-JW
SOCIAL MEDIA
Jane was on the front page of Reddit six years ago
And finally, introducing a new section…
SUBSCRIBER REC OF THE WEEK
Per y’all’s suggestion, we’re going to be publishing recommendations from YOU! We’ll publish one every week. Reply directly to this email or use this google form to submit your rec. Can’t wait to hear from you smart and cultured cookies!!
This week’s rec is from Athelia P. of LA/Singapore:
Hunters - TV Show
“Raw, thrilling and unexpected, Hunters honours and relays the stories of Holocaust survivors while shining light on a particularly horrific bit US government fuckery. It will make you chortle, you’ll probably cry, and Al Pacino does good acting.”
Thanks Theelz for the rec!!
Have and great week and go tell one friend to subscribe to OLT!