Hi! You're reading a monthly newsletter in which I, copywriter and perpetual opinion-haver
Laura Reineke
, share with you some Stuff that I endorse. Your mileage may vary.
👋 Know About Me
Look: A lot of not-that-chill shit has happened since this newsletter last hit inboxes in November 2019. You know it, I know it, every brand whose email updates you unwittingly subscribed to knows it. So let’s just cut to the recommendations, k? It’ll be a nice distraction for all of us.
🔗 Read Online
My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore? - Feels a bit early to label any coronavirus writing as definitive of the moment, but this reflection from a Manhattan chef should be a contender. (Gabrielle Hamilton/NYT]
Finding Meaning in The Book of Henry, the Best Worst Movie of the Year [2017] - Sometimes you just wanna experience someone tearing a dumb bad movie to shreds. (Dave Holmes/Esquire)
On the Mat We’re Briefly Perfect - A lovely meditation on the themes of self-sacrifice in Netflix’s [super compelling!!] docuseries Cheer. (Arielle Zibrak/Avidly)
Heard But Not Seen - On hip-hop and Black music as the “default ambiance” in expensive gyms, farm-to-table restaurants, hipster bars, and other mostly white spaces. (Tre Johnson/Slate)
The Afterlife of Big Ideas in Education Reform [2018] - It’s easy to brainstorm outside-the-box methods for improving our failing public school system. But who’s to blame when even the most successful experiments prove impossible to scale? (Michael Hobbes/Pacific Standard)
The Age of Instagram Face - A must-read on the streamlining - through social media algorithms, makeup trends, and plastic surgery - of a single cyborgian visage. (Jia Tolentino/New Yorker)
“Distant Summer,” Kadir Nelson. 2020.
📖 Read Elsewhere
After months of pretending like I’d never even seen a book, I demolished two weirdly thematically similar new-ish releases in a single weekend. The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel reads like one of those expanding ball toys, zooming in and out on a pair of half-siblings, two unsettling mysteries, and the web of a Ponzi scheme. The Dutch House by Ann Patchett follows the lives of a brother and sister forced from their lavish Philadelphia estate by an evil stepmother. Both novels are unfussy and absorbing - I loved them.
📺 Watch
I’m usually too impatient to watch videos longer than a minute, but I love how wonderfully this mini biography of conceptual artist John Baldessari - who died in January at age 88 - conveys both the spirit of his work and the specificity of his personality. (It helps that it is narrated by Tom Waits.)
💰 Buy
Piecework Puzzles - If you’re gonna spend hours of your life assembling a jigsaw puzzle, might as well make it a sturdy, exceptionally good-looking one. I put together Tutti-Frutti recently and understood for the first time the impulse to frame these things.
✅ Try
Copilot - I’ve experimented with so many budgeting apps that were…mostly fine, but Copilot is the first to offer exactly what I want: straightforward tracking of income, expenses, and subscriptions in a super clean UI. No bells and whistles. No nonsense. Thank u for helping me feel a modicum of control during these unprecedented times, Copilot.
Nicole Rucker’s Key lime pie recipe - My old coworker Donny Tsang documented baking this pie on his Instagram and it just looked too good not to try out myself. Of course, once I find something I like, I cannot and will not let it go, so now I’ve made it like four times and also foisted it on my family. It’s perfectly tart, and sweet but not too sweet - a summertime dream. I prefer it w an additional ½-ish tablespoon of sugar in the whipped topping, but honestly, no modifications are necessary.
She’s so photogenic!!
🗣️ Quote
“If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting.” - Zadie Smith, On Optimism and Despair [2016]
🎧 Listen To
How Did This Get Made? - As I noted above, sometimes you just wanna experience someone tearing dumb bad movies to shreds. Enter this podcast, which I’ve had on repeat nearly every day for like two years. That hosts Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas are working actors makes them well-equipped to point out batshit crazy filmmaking choices without becoming total snobs about it. A good starter episode from this year: #231 “The Master of Disguise” [2002]. (And no, you don’t need to watch the movies to enjoy the pod.)
Haim - Women In Music Pt. III [2020] - Popping on this album feels like cracking open a crisp IPA on a hot afternoon. I’ve been grooving to these summery tunes all week.
☀️ Forecast
Wearing a mask. Drinking coffee outside. Might challenge myself to come up with some new baby-talk names for my cat. How do we feel about Poof McGoof?
Be well,
xo Laura
Got some stuff you think *I* should? Reply to this email or holler on Twitter
@ohonestly
. Thx for reading. Love u.