I know there’s a commonly held belief that rain on your wedding day is good luck for the marriage. Is there a similar adage about everything going wrong in the lead-up to it? Asking for a friend.

Anyway, we have a glorious heatwave weekend ahead, during which I will be wearing my Leset Kyoto shorts on repeat with these jelly flip flops that make you feel like you’re walking on clouds. Have a lovely one — see you Monday!

Read more

I’ve found it so interesting to watch the fallout from these ensemble cast reality TV shows; first Scandoval, and now Scamanda. Vulture’s feature on the “mid-life crisis” engulfing these reality TV shows — whose core premise is being young, keen and eager — is great and very true: how long can it be fun to watch a 42-year-old man cosplay as a Peter Pan-like character while gallivanting around in a houseshare with 20-somethings?

Re-reading it post-Summer House also sent me down a Reddit rabbit hole to see what everybody’s predicting for next season (which starts filming on July 4th weekend), and now I’m convinced that Amanda will definitely come back to face the music. But will Ciara? And will Kyle? And is this the death knell for the reality stars so many of us have spent the best part of a decade investing in? The Valley, Southern Charm — I’m looking at you. If you have absolutely no idea what on G-d’s green earth I’m talking about, tell me and I’ll be more than happy to share my Bravo starter pack with you.

Read more

The shopping doesn’t look set to stop anytime soon, though, as our engagement party is on Saturday and I need to find something to wear that I love. G-d, there are too many things to think about as a bride! I saw somebody say this week that planning a wedding is only as stressful as the time you devote to it — so if you spend a year planning a wedding, expect a year of simmering stress; if you spend three months, expect three months’ worth. It’s so true. We’ve given ourselves a year, so a year’s worth of stress it is!

Anyway! Plenty more where that came from. Here’s everything I loved today.

• Rachel Connolly is a wonderful, succinct writer, one of the rare few who lends words to my very own thoughts. This piece for The Guardian on the rise of “loneliness influencers” is so on-the-money.

A few years ago, I described the dominant aesthetic of mainstream influencers as one characterised by bland, secluded, cosiness. You never really see their friends. They mostly stay in. They appear to inhabit intentionally bland environments, carpeted in grey and upholstered in beige; they wear bland clothes, they read bland books, they rewatch bland TV shows. Their content has always displayed a kind of baroque emptiness.

What makes a person want to become an influencer? You might say they like attention or are pursuing fame. But I have come to think that the idea of operating in a gamified social environment which can theoretically be managed from one’s bedroom is a large part of the appeal.

• Ballerina Farm a.k.a. Hannah Neeleman has spoken about Caro Claire Burke's runaway hit Yesteryear — rumoured to be about her — in a new interview with

Read more

I also feel like the beauty of sharing recommendations really lies in your ability then to converse around said recommendation, and I want to create a dialogue with you (ignore that horribly obnoxious turn-of-phrase.) I want to know what you think of the stuff I share! I want to hear from you! I want to chew the fat!

So, here goes. Let’s see how we get on. Here’s your first daily dispatch from Cultural Memory HQ.

• In case you missed it, The Atlantic wrote a haunting but brilliantly reported piece last week, titled “How Britain became as poor as Mississippi” and it is a bleak appraisal of modern life in the UK:

The country’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state — and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London. Outside the capital, in places where tourists do not visit, living standards fall well below Mississippi’s. Brits visiting the United States find that their currency has depreciated to the point where the pound today buys only about $1.35. British wages have lagged well behind those in the U.S., and also those in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark; once you account for inflation, they’ve barely grown at all. Within the next decade, the typical Pole will have a standard of living equal to the typical Brit, if current trends continue.

• The influencer-ification of the bridal party is something I feel personally victimised by, as someone currently in the thick of planning a wedding. The Cut has written the definitive piece on how hen dos, bridesmaid proposals and bachelorette parties have become full branding exercises — one woman emailed 425 brands asking for free products to put in her bridesmaid proposal boxes, the idea for which came from Instagram. It is so fascinating to me how weddings have become launchpads: for influencer careers, for personal brands, for content strategies. It is fascinating! Endlessly fascinating! And also slightly gross!

Read more

Before I can reveal too much about a project I’ve been pouring my heart into since January (you guys are going to love it), just know that something really fun and special is coming that I would love all of you to attend if you’re able. I should be able to reveal what I’ve been working on in the coming weeks — and I am EXCITED about it.

In the meantime, enjoy this bumper Cultural Memory! (Also, as an aside — if I wrote a daily Substack on everything I read, watched and listened to, would you want it? Tell me in the comments.)

Under the paywall this week: the woman behind the Substack I am obsessed with, the novella I adored (if you’ve ever felt heartbroken or nostalgic for a situationship, you need to read it), and a load of other article, podcast, TV and movie recommendations too.

WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING

• If you, like me, are absolutely sick of self-optimisation culture, you will — hopefully — love my most recent feature for Air Mail, which is about the explosion of anti-optimisation, of which friction-maxxing — a huge part of this year’s lexicon — is a core tenet. My favourite thing I learned while writing it: there is a monastic retreat in the Netherlands in which you live silently and in isolation, essentially as a monk, for a week, and it’s entirely sold out for 2026.

• I also wrote a paean to my love of blow-dries for British Vogue, pegged to the return of my other lover, TV series Rivals, in which the hair is almost a paid actor in its own right. Larger-than-life hair feels well and truly back, and I, for one, am thrilled — because I bloody love big hair.

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

• This will come as no great surprise to any journalist employed post-2014, but I was saddened to learn of the mass redundancies at Glamour magazine. Almost the entire team was cut, with the business now pivoting — per the New York Times — to focus on shopping and affiliate content. I’m often asked by young, aspiring journalists what my advice for them is, and if I’m totally honest, I don’t know that I’d encourage anybody to pursue journalism in 2026. The world has changed, and the opportunities worth chasing have changed with it. I’m so grateful to have been a journalist and to have learned so much from everything I’ve done and been exposed to — but it really is a different world now.

Read more

I have spent most of this week thinking about my return to Rutshire. Disney+ has premiered the first three episodes of Rivals season two and I couldn’t have rushed to watch them more. Once I finished them, I started season one from the beginning again. When my fiancé suggested that maybe, just maybe, I’d been sat in front of a screen for too long and perhaps it was time for bed, I did what any super fan would do: I showered while listening to the Rivals podcast. I have become a woman possessed by a deep seated love for Jilly Cooper’s wondrously bonkers fictional world.

My best friend Ella is also a Cooper acolyte, and we’ve talked at length about how fun, frothy and care-free the 1980s are to watch on the small screen (geopolitical turmoil of the era aside, of course). It made me think of how frivolous it feels to watch something set during an era Instagram comments didn’t exist yet — where the only thing people “posted” was a letter, or a cheque and where TikTok was merely a sound the clock made. It all seemed so innocent, so uncomplicated. Then another friend told me she couldn’t stop watching Off Campus, Prime Video’s adaptation of Elle Kennedy's bestselling book series. It seems she’s not alone: within days of its release, Off Campus raced up Prime Video's Top 10 TV Shows global chart to assume first place, yet another example of our collective love-in with YA adaptations.

It seems to me that whether we’re binging Off Campus, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Heated Rivalry or Rivals — all wildly popular shows with different premises — we are all desperately yearning for simpler, more-care-free times. There is something about watching characters whose biggest problems are mending their teenage heartache or snogging behind a bush at the Polo that feels almost like a kind of grief. Grief for a version of life that perhaps never quite existed, but that we are all, collectively, reaching for anyway. I know I certainly am. The world outside feels loud and relentless and I, for one, am not above retreating to Rutshire for the evening.

In this week’s Cultural Memory, I write about the two books I loved this week — I do not give credit where credit is not due, but these two books truly stopped me in my tracks — the podcast episodes I haven’t been able to stop thinking about, and the articles that were so gripping I took pictures and shared with my friends. I hope you enjoy!

Read more

That’s not to say that the event was thwarted in any tangible way by the protests that attempted to de-rail it (have you seen the viral video of Amazon Labour representative Chris Smalls being tackled just outside of the red carpet space?) or the commentary around the world’s third-richest man Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos’ reported $10 million sponsorship of the event. No, in those ways, the event went off without a hitch.

What feels seismic to me is what it represents about where we are as a society. It feels nauseating to me to see the usual best dressed articles (which I have had to reluctantly write throughout my own time as a journalist) essentially sanitising the event while omitting the fact that this year’s event was paid for by one of President Trump’s oligarchs (Amazon, founded by Bezos, donated $1 million to the president's inaugural fund and streamed the ceremony on Prime, amounting to another $1 million in-kind donation, per The Wall Street Journal.) Amazon sponsored the event in 2012, and the couple attended it in 2024, but this feels different.

It feels like a scene straight out of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; a perfect example of the rich buying their way into the rarefied, upper echelons of society. Using their money to hop-scotch their way to the top at a time when people, especially in America, are struggling to even make ends meet.

Naturally, this week’s round-up contains many a mention of the Met Gala, but it also is filled with lots more. Under the paywall are a string of excellent podcast recommendations, my honest thoughts on one of the International Booker Prize’s most-hyped novels, and a few pieces of journalism that, as usual, have restored my faith in journalism.

• For anybody even remotely interested in the Met Gala — how it works, why it exists, what it actually is — I’d recommend listening to this episode of Back Row with Amy Odell, titled The Bezos Backlash, Devil Wears Prada 2, and What It All Means for Anna Wintour. Chantal Fernandez, features writer at The Cut, is Odell’s guest on the podcast and it is fascinating to hear them unpack the origins of the event, and their thoughts on the current climate surrounding it. Their discussion is the sort of fashion commentary I love; discussions that understand fashion as part of a wider, more sweeping cultural vista. Fashion is inherently political, and so too are these starry, glitzy events.

  A few of my favourite tidbits that I gleaned from the episode: there was going to be a John Galliano exhibition until it was vetoed by stakeholders (although he has since apologised, Galliano was fired from Dior, ostracised from the fashion industry, and convicted by a French court in 2011 after a series of public antisemitic and racist tirades, which included saying "I love Hitler" and telling a woman her ancestors should have been gassed); the 2018 Heavenly Bodies: Fashion & The Catholic Imagination-themed Met Gala was going to be multi-faith until Versace signed on as a sponsor, meaning that focusing on Catholicism ultimately made more sense; and before the pandemic in 2019, American Vogue’s former editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, who leads fundraising for the event, raised $15 million. In 2025, that figure stood at $31 million, the largest sum in its 77-year history, according to museum officials — a truly nauseating reflection of where America currently stands.

Read more

The homogeneity of the internet is something I think about a lot. Everything feels the same; every platform feels designed to suck your attention into the palms of some Silicon Valley overlord. Which is exactly why I love this man who potters about rating sticky toffee puddings. Please follow him. You will not regret it.

In other news, this week’s round-up is a beefy one. I’ve been deep in a Patrick Radden Keefe hole — if you haven’t read London Falling yet, do so immediately — finished a delicious novel, and listened to so many podcast episodes that my ears may need a formal recovery period. Enjoy.

• Naturally, I’ve been following the Alex vs. Alix fallout with baited breath, and, it must be said, things are not looking so good for Cooper. A recent report from Bloomberg has been released, which says that the Unwell network is not doing well at all. In the last year alone, the company’s head of brand marketing, head of network and chief growth officer have all left their roles, while Cooper and her husband, Matt Kaplan, have been accused of essentially fostering a hostile work environment. Kaplan’s behaviour, per the article, is so bad that some employees have threatened to quit on the job while he has allegedly “earned a reputation for frequently yelling at staff members” and threatening to blacklist them.

• I am a huge fan of the Real Housewives franchise, and obviously Salt Lake City has, in recent years, emerged as the front-running franchise. It is obnoxiously dramatic, outré and in so many ways entirely unbelievable — yet that’s the entire beauty of it; it is actually that crazy. There are a few members of RHOSLC who converted to Mormonism, and members who have similarly left the Church. The Cut’s long-read on the increased prevalence of Mormons in popular culture is fascinating, and so was this confessional podcast episode of Girlscamp about why its host turned her back on Mormonism.

  I didn’t know that before 1978, Black Mormons were prohibited from fully participating in temple rituals, and Black men also couldn’t hold leadership positions before this time. The Church has a trademark on the word Mormon as well, so when Heather Gay, one of the cast members of RHOSLC used the title Bad Mormon as the title of her first book, the LDS church sued to prevent her from using the phrase “Bad Mormon.”

  And while you may think that all of this has led to a decrease in membership, in 2025 the Church claimed that it saw the “highest number of convert baptisms of any 12-month period in its history, though this data is not yet publicly available.” This year alone, LDS is building 16 new temples around the world.

Mormonism’s mimetic culture, a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses competitiveness, is instilled in members from a young age. All Mormons are taught to demonstrate “worthiness”; only those deemed worthy can get married in a Mormon temple and live forever in eternity with their families. (The least worthy will spend a millennium in a temporary hell called “spirit prison.”) Starting at age 12, they are summoned to interviews with their bishops in which they’re asked about their spiritual commitment, good works, prayer, and chastity. This constant striving for worthiness creates a norm of community surveillance; at church-funded Brigham Young University, students are encouraged to report each other for honor-code violations like drinking or having premarital sex.

Only Mormon men can baptize, bless, prophesise, and join the church’s highest leadership ranks. For LDS women, being worthy depends first and foremost on the divine callings of marriage and motherhood.”

• This feels like old news now but I was surprised that Kanye West’s performance at Wireless even got to the stage of being confirmed and announced — I have no idea what the festival organisers were thinking. This is a man who, in the last year alone, boasted about making millions of dollars from the sale of swastika T-shirts he released, and who released songs called Heil Hitler and Gas Chamber (now re-named to All About Love). The fall-out (Wireless has now been cancelled and Kanye has been banned from entering the UK) raises an interesting subject, which is who gets to be cancelled and who doesn’t? Fast-forward this News Meeting podcast episode to 19:37 to get to the Kanye debate. Panorama’s recent 30-minute episode on the rise of antisemitic attacks in London is also well worth a watch.

• Another podcast episode I loved this week was this: “Is my favourite new TV show this year a ripoff?” courtesy of the Search Engine podcast. I have heard great things about The Pitt, but had missed all of the news surrounding the fact that (deep breath) the wife of the deceased creator of ER, which services as an inspiration for the series, is suing the writers of The Pitt, claiming it’s a ripoff and should’ve been credited as part created by Michael Critten (who created ER). Such an interesting conversation especially in the age of IP and during an era in which, in order to guarantee eyeballs, companies are increasingly commissioning less and less original content and more leaning into the genres that have historically performed. I’m saving The Pitt for a sleepy weekend day when I can just curl up and lose myself in it.

• My copy of Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book London Falling arrived on Friday afternoon, and by Sunday morning I had finished it. What a phenomenally thorough, delicate and forensic investigative piece of work, something that Radden Keefe is a master of. Keefe wrote a story for the New Yorker in 2024 about the death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who died under mysterious circumstances in London, and whose parents endeavoured to get to the bottom of what transpired in the months leading up to his death. It’s a heartbreaking tale of Brettler’s final months, but Keefe weaves a broader portrait too: one of a corrupt London whose criminal underbelly trumps any real sense of morality from authorities. I cannot recommend reading it enough. It is an absolutely fantastic book.

• I inevitably then fell down a Radden Keefe rabbit hole, and I found this story from the New York Times that offers wider context to Keefe’s career as a whole; I’ve since added his second book, The Snakehead, about human smuggling into Chinatown in the 1990s to my to-be-read pile, and have listened to the entirety of his podcast series Wind of Change, in which he talks about the secret history of Cold War espionage and heavy metal music. I have two of his most recent works, Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, on my bookshelf and I will be reading them at my next available opportunity. He is a true force.

• I’m not a loyal Rest is Entertainment listener, but I loved their recent episode on the Wild West of 2000s reality TV. They ask why our culture created such a toxic environment for contestants, and whether anything has changed. No, we don’t have Playing It Straight or The Swan anymore (IYKYK), but what we do have, twenty years after many of these shows premiered, is a stable of tell-all documentaries coming out about them. The Swan took self-proclaimed “ugly ducklings,” and, over the course of three months, attempted to turn them into “swans”. Hulu has now commissioned a tell-all documentary about the making and creation of the show, which will no doubt shine an unflattering light on it in the same way that Netflix’s America’s Next Top Model documentary did. The genre of reality TV is so prevalent today that it can be easy to forget the time in which it wasn’t the norm.

• I finished Stephanie Sy-Quia's debut novel A Private Man this week as well and I thought it was deeply profound and moving. The last third of the book in particular contained one of the most lyrical passages about love that I’ve read in recent years, I heaved when I read it (naturally, Sy-Quia is an award-winning poet.) Inspired by the true story of Sy-Quia’s grandparents, A Private Man traces the slow-burn love story between David, a Catholic priest, and Margaret, a theology teacher, across Rome and England during the twentieth century as they try (and largely fail) to usher the Church into a more progressive space. It’s about love, sacrifice, devotion, inheritance and hope and truly simmers with tension. I adored it.

• I’m not typically a big Netflix fan, but there are three TV shows that I’ve adored this week: At Home with the Furys, Big Mistakes and the second season of Beef. At Home with the Furys is fascinating to me because while the entire show’s premise really hinges on the unpredictability and in many ways toxicity of Tyson Fury, I can’t help but love the family’s devotion to one another. Their eldest daughter, Venezuela, recently got engaged at the age of 16 and the pride that Tyson and his wife, Paris, feel is so palpable, it actually made me cry (yes, I’m hormonal.)

  Big Mistakes is Dan Levy’s follow-up to Schitt’s Creek (a TV show that made me howl with laughter.) Levy co-created Big Mistakes with internet It-girl Rachel Sennott, and it is truly very, very funny. It tells the story of priest Nicky (Levy) and his sister Morgan (Taylor Ortega), two siblings who wind up in over their heads after an ill-thought-out robbery hurtles them into a world of organised crime. Silly, satirical and very worth much a watch.

  Beef season two, meanwhile, is miles better than the first and is what The White Lotus wishes it could be (I maintain that the hype around the HBO series may well be the death knell of its success.) In this season, Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan play Josh and Lindsay, a millennial couple whose marriage is quietly curdling — he runs an upper-crust country club, and she gave up her own dreams to help him do it. When Gen Z staff members Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin (Charles Melton) witness Josh raising a golf club at his wife, everyone ends up in a blackmail spiral that nobody has the emotional vocabulary to extricate themselves from. Presiding over it all: Youn Yuh-jung as the billionaire Korean club owner. Lee Sung Jin described this season as passive-aggressive rather than overt — and it is a sizzling watch.

While this has had a detrimental impact on my ability to speak — I attended a drinks reception at Downing Street for women in media this week and had to request a lemon and honey, nature’s antiseptic — it has meant that I’ve lost myself in a load of articles, documentaries and podcasts as I’ve slipped in and out of sleep, trying to recover all that was lost during our many Céline Dion singalongs. I am also considering starting reality series Summer House too, just to keep up with the latest cheating scandal from two of its cast members (in case you missed it, this is a great re-cap.)

This week’s Cultural Memory round-up includes so many fantastic long-reads, a pop culture podcast I have been absolutely loving (the closest thing to a High Low substitute I’ve found) and some seriously fantastic documentaries — true crime and otherwise — on Netflix.

• The story I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this week has nothing to do with anything I’ve watched or read — it’s the Lindy West situation, which has consumed the internet and, frankly, me. If you’re not familiar: West is the feminist writer behind Shrill (which later became a Hulu series), and she has just released a new memoir, Adult Braces, in which she details how her husband Aham told her he wanted an open relationship. She initially resisted — and was devastated, by her own account — then discovered he already had two secret girlfriends. But rather than leaving, she leaned in and by 2022, the three had announced their throuple in a YouTube video. They now all live together in a cabin outside Seattle and West insists she’s not just at peace with it — she’s happy. She even fell in love with Roya, her husband’s girlfriend, herself. Inevitably, the internet lost its mind.

  What I find so fascinating about this story — and why I think it has cut through in the way it has — is that it’s functioning as a kind of cultural Rorschach test. People are projecting everything onto it: their feelings about feminism, about what women owe men, about whether you can truly consent to something that was initially done to you. The responses range from genuine concern that West was coerced, to accusations that she has betrayed feminism, to — and this is the part I find most uncomfortable — a very particular kind of cruelty dressed up as solidarity. “He ain’t all that, dump him” is not feminist allyship. It’s just another way of telling a woman you know better than she does about her own life. Then came the added drama of her husband emailing the Slate journalist who profiled them — reportedly taking issue with how little the piece praised his own work — which did him absolutely no favours whatsoever.

  I don’t know what the truth of Lindy West’s marriage is, and neither does anyone else on the internet. What I do know is that the response to it has revealed something quite telling about how confronting it seems to be to us as a society when women we respect make choices we don’t understand. I’d highly recommend her episode of Modern Love; if you’d rather read a transcript, you can do so here.

• I’ve never read a book written by AI, but other readers certainly appear to have — and it’s led to the cancellation of Shy Girl by Mia Ballard, which, per the New York Times, has been pulled from stores in the US and will no longer be published in the UK, due to concerns that it “relied heavily on artificial intelligence.” I’m fascinated by this. The article notes that Shy Girl, self-published in 2025, “received some rave reviews, eventually drawing more than 4,900 ratings on Goodreads, averaging 3.52 stars.”

• Another book drama, also courtesy of the New York Times, surrounds one of the wealthiest women in America, Amy Griffin, whose memoir The Tell was the first book to be jointly endorsed by Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, and Jenna Bush Hager’s wildly popular book clubs. In it, Griffin writes about psychedelic-drug therapy that recovered memories of being raped on multiple occasions by a teacher when she was a young girl. On the back of the book’s release, she was named one of Time magazine’s most influential people of the year. Then came a lawsuit in which a former classmate declared that the memories described in The Tell were actually hers, not Griffin’s. An absolutely fascinating story — I’m intrigued to watch how it plays out, and it raises interesting questions about whose memories belong to whom, and how publishers can police or fact-check personal recollections.

Read more

I don’t know how I could ever truly quantify whether or not I have reached that nebulous zenith of self-knowing, but I do know that I’m closer to it today than I was three months ago. And in three months’ time, I don’t doubt that I’ll be even closer still.

This week I hosted the Q&A for the second season of Channel 4’s Big Mood and the opportunity, to me, has felt like proof that when you take leaps of faith, when you follow your heart and intuition, things begin to align. There’s a Yiddish word that’s bandied around a lot in Judaism: beshert, which means “destined” or “meant to be”. Things have happened in quick succession for me of late that are so beautifully on-time in my life that I have found myself saying “beshert” again and again and again. It hasn’t been — and isn’t in many ways — easy, but it feels like things are slotting into place naturally, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

In the meantime, I had a buccal facial massage this morning with a six-foot-tall man named Dimitri. It was in the basement of a hairdresser tucked just behind Baker Street. It lasted 90 minutes and cost £80 — which I think is frankly a bargain for a treatment in central London — and it was phenomenal. The brief I gave him (which he didn’t ask for) was that I wanted to look embryonic; I wanted my skin restored to the youthful bounce it once had. He largely ignored me, but proceeded to provide something very close to it indeed. If you’d like his details, DM me and I’ll share them!

This week’s cultural dispatch includes the two best true crime podcasts I’ve listened to since Sweet Bobby (RIP Serial), several pieces of writing that have reminded me of the power of good, thoughtful journalism (also RIP), and a few TV recommendations I’ve loved. Enjoy!

• I am not yet a parent — please G-d one day I will be — but dear and beloved friends of mine are either trying to conceive or set to welcome children, and it’s on this tidal wave of change that I ride. This fantastic feature from The Atlantic seems to summarise what a lot of my friends who are parents have been saying: that rearing a child is world-altering and incredible, and simultaneously difficult, monotonous, and boring. And while boredom is often maligned as an overarchingly negative emotion, it is often the means by which we can fully realise the meaning of the things we love most. This quote in particular really stayed with me — I scribbled it in my journal:

“Everything that displays a pattern is pregnant with boredom,” Brodsky told those flabbergasted undergrads. Of course, much of what displays a pattern — lifelong friendships, enduring marriages, serious scholarship, the making of art, prayer, Sunday mornings in winter — is also pregnant with meaning. Boredom is the price we pay for a life rich with meaning. Recognising this makes the feeling more endurable.

Read more

I’ve been beavering away on some really exciting projects I can’t wait to share — but for now, my latest cultural dispatch.

Under the paywall: the best non-fiction book I’ve read this year, a podcast episode so good I listened to it twice (not two-and-a-half hours long, I promise), and a 2025 novel that deserves far more love than it received.

• Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl is one of the best books I’ve read on popular culture, yet I’d never sought out interviews with Gilbert herself until this week, while researching a feature. I stumbled upon a podcast episode in which she is so eloquent on the performance of modern femininity — and she fascinatingly shared the origins of “girl power,” which I’d never heard before:

Girl power as a slogan was initially popularised by two members of Bikini Kill, the riot girl punk band, Kathleen Hanna and Toby Vail. And I think Toby said, what’s a word that doesn’t go with girl? They were looking for two words that no one would put together. And Kathleen said, power. So the pairing of girl and power was supposed to stop and make you think, it was supposed to make you realise, why don’t we associate girls with power?

Read more

Curious as to why his mother abandoned him, I stumbled upon an article which suggested that his was a first-time mother, meaning her inexperience may have overwhelmed her. It also noted that because Punch was born during a heatwave, his mother may well have prioritised her own survival over Punch’s. The way the internet has banded together to protect this monkey has truly tickled me. ICYMI, these are a few of my favourite Punch jokes;

I was also invited to the press preview of the Tate Modern’s Tracey Emin retrospective last week — which is now open to the public! — and, in true Emin fashion, it is incredibly moving and profound. I particularly loved seeing 1995’s Why I Never Became a Dancer in the flesh, a gorgeous meditation on her childhood years in Margate, and of course the Turner Prize-nominated My Bed. It occurred to me, while pottering around, that while confession is currency now, when Emin first started making art she really was the original provocateur to — in the words of Bethenny Frankel — ‘mention it all.’ We take for granted that the world wasn’t always this frank and ‘story-timed’; for a long while, it was the job of artists like Emin to break the mould. Her recent interview with Emma Barnett is wonderful; she talks about how every time she installs My Bed, she has to wear a hazmat suit, and the detritus that comprises the piece is now 30 years old. The apple core that’s displayed as part of My Bed at the Tate is the same apple core from the first time she installed the piece in 1998. A 30 year old apple core! Nothing has been replaced, including the sheets. Hearing Emin talk feels like such a treat; her Desert Island Discs from 2004 is absolute heaven, too.

Under the paywall today is a book that I read in 48 hours and struggled to put it down (it is so good); two wildly-underrated 2000s rom-coms that I cannot believe are not talked about more and some pop culture lore that I cannot believe evaded me for so long.

• Good Lord, Richard E. Grant’s episode of Fashion Neurosis is delicious. Come for Bella Freud’s dulcet tones, stay for Grant’s ebullience. My favourite tidbits that I gleaned are that he reads four books a week (!!) on average, and he described paying people compliments as a ‘conversational cul-de-sac’; a one-way street that actually hinders conversations with new people as it’s a reflection of a kind of a relational imbalance. I’d never thought of it like that before!

• I’m not a member of a book club despite being a voracious reader (should I join one?), but I was intrigued to listen to The Book Club, Goalhanger’s latest podcast with Dominic Sandbrook and his Rest of History producer and fellow book lover, Tabby Syrett. It’s very analytical, which I suppose is to be expected, but I found myself feeling like there’s a gaping hole for a book podcast that sits within wider cultural conversations. I don’t know that listening to people talk about one book for an hour is my type of thing, but perhaps if there were a conversation about a book I really loved I’d feel differently. I feel so passionately about what’s lacking in the culture podcast realm, maybe I should just start one myself..

• I found Conan O’Brien on the New Yorker Radio Hour really moving; Rob and Michelle Reiner were at a party at his house the night that they died, and I thought the way that O’Brien spoke about the nebulous nature of grief really touching.

• If, like me, you’ve found yourself desperate to know more about the Iranian regime, I would thoroughly recommend you listen to The Rest Is History’s series on the country’s political landscape. It is absolutely fascinating, and I found it helpful in terms of understanding a lot of the commentary that’s being posited at the moment.

Read more

Part of that gentleness has been slowing down my consumption of things; rather than consuming things in haste purely to have consumed them and to have formed an opinion of my own, I’m enjoying being a little slower and more intentional. I’m sure once I’m out the other side of whatever this slump is, that will shift, but for now, I’m okay with it.

Under the paywall today is the book that will be the breakout novel of 2026, a short novella that I rediscovered recently and that broke my heart all over again, the new BBC series that has brought me so much joy and an oldie-but-goodie podcast episode with Zadie Smith.

• I asked my best friend, and fellow prolific reader, what her favourite comfort book was this week, and she replied and said that she didn’t have one particular book that she returned to when feeling sad/bereft/heartbroken. It made me think about what my own comfort books would be, and perhaps through instinct or muscle memory, Deborah Levy’s writing came to my mind.

  Hot Milk is one of my favourite novels of all time — and, surprisingly, I thought the adaptation was incredibly faithful to the book — and perhaps because I’ve read Levy’s work primarily during testing periods of my life, I find her writing comforting.

  I was then reminded of this Guardian profile of Levy from a few years ago, which I remember loving so much I printed it out and highlighted my favourite parts. Isn’t this such a beautiful way to be described?

She [Deborah] is the sort of person who makes the mundane remarkable. Even going down to the bakery with her to get a baguette becomes a slightly magical thing’, her friend the novelist Tash Aw told me. When her friends talk about her, they say things like this: ‘she is an event’, ‘she is a personage’, ‘she is a whole world.’

• The criticism that Chloe Malle received upon her appointment as head of editorial content at Vogue was largely unfair, in my opinion. Fashion is relevant within the context of the wider cultural landscape; and a good editor — particularly, ironically, a fashion editor — is not always somebody who adores clothes per se, but rather understands and appreciates the cultural references and nuances that inform fashion itself.

  Malle and Wintour’s first sit-down interview together for the New York Times was a fascinating five-minute clip of watching tensions, expectations and approvals unspool. The fact that Wintour flinched when Malle was asked what she’d do with a bigger budget was an actual laugh-out-loud moment that I’m sure all of my fellow journalist friends also winced at. I also loved Anna, sunglasses on, bob slick as ever, stating that she doesn’t get nervous. Of course Anna Wintour doesn’t get nervous.

• Looksmaxxing is the kind of internet trend that makes me roll my eyes so hard into the back of my head I worry I’ll never be able to dislodge them, but this New York Times interview with the influencer Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Peters, took it to a new level.

  A subculture of the manosphere, Peters is a proponent of looksmaxxing, which is the act of ‘ascending’ by changing and altering your appearance. The belief is that male attractiveness is the key to worldly achievement. He unsurprisingly doesn’t think women should looksmaxx (G-d forbid any woman exercise any kind of control over her own body!) and refers to sex as ‘slay-maxxing’. Peters has, he believes, also rendered himself infertile due to his excessive use of testosterone replacement therapy. This sentence from the interview, for me, sums up the entire shock (but also the underlying predictability) of the enterprise:

  Clavicular himself seems as much as anything a calculating product of a hyperactive digital culture that rewards the violation of taboo.

  Hilariously, he also says in the interview that he would vote for Governor Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, over Vice President JD Vance because he preferred Mr. Newsom’s looks to Mr. Vance’s. He then drops this sucker punch of a line:

  ‘It wasn’t, like, a political statement at all,’ Clavicular said later of his criticism of Mr. Vance. ‘I was just saying he’s fat.’

• 2000s rom-coms — this week’s were Monster-in-Law and 1998’s The Parent Trap, to name two of my personal favourites — are being played on a loop at the moment in my house as my fiancé and I attempt to claw our way back to the fun of planning a wedding. But watching them has made me think: where did all the good rom-coms go?

  In the age of streaming and social media, it feels like most original romantic films made of late exist purely as white noise — a soundtrack for somebody second-screening. I wonder whether TV has swooped in and taken film’s rom-com crown, which perhaps is its own sign that our attention spans are forever ruined.

• I haven’t seen Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation yet, but I did rewatch Andrea Arnold’s 2011 remake of Emily Brontë’s seminal novel, which is pure perfection in my eyes. I’m definitely not a purist when it comes to adaptations, but the moodiness and grittiness of Arnold’s take on the book is exactly how I saw the story unfold in my own mind. I think that’s the magic of culture: somebody having the ability to recreate what your own mind saw.

Read more

When I usually feel this way — and I am all too aware that you can’t experience the highs without these very real lows! — reading helps me to escape, but this week I’ve felt mentally blocked and reading books, for the first time in a long time, hasn’t been able to distract me. Instead, I’ve found myself wanting to physically explore new things, and mentally allow my brain to breathe as I spoon-feed it what it feels like it needs. I’m moving softly, and gently with myself as I figure this out. I hope you’re doing the same with yourself too, if you’re feeling similarly this week.

This is everything I’ve loved this week:

• A friend gifted me a National Art Pass for my birthday, and it struck me this week how fabulous a gift idea it is. I get 50% off most major exhibitions across the UK, and free access to many other, smaller venues — one of which is the Museum of Brands in Notting Hill, which I’d never heard of before but which I am not afraid to say is absolutely bloody fantastic. I spent more than two hours pottering around its exhibits, which are a treasure trove of British history and the national-treasure-status brands we have collectively loved as a nation since the Victorian era. It’s fascinating, and I cannot stop imploring everybody I know to go and visit it.

• Earlier in the week, I was having a conversation with somebody about Holocaust Memorial Day, and they mentioned the ‘British Schindler,’ Sir Nicholas Winton—a name I was unfamiliar with. He was a man who saved 669 children from Czechoslovakia on the eve that World War II broke out in 1939, organising their safe passage to Britain. The film made about his work, One Life, is heart-wrenching. Anthony Hopkins — who I loved in The Father — is sublime as Winton, and so is Helena Bonham Carter as his mother, Babi. I watched it with my mother and we both were weeping by the end of it.

• I attended the Ffilmic Awards on Friday night as my fiancé was receiving an award for his short film Atlas. As part of the ceremony, we watched all of the nominated shorts, one of which I found particularly moving. Directed by Anastasia Savinova, Ten Days tells the story of a multi-generational family emotionally torn apart by the outbreak of the Russia–Ukraine war. It delicately weaves in the generational divide now manifesting between old and young Russians: the former, more attuned to state media, metabolize the country’s propaganda as fact, while younger audiences, more au fait with western media that they consume typically via social media platforms, are more opposed. The film follows pacifist Lena, who takes steps to resist the war while living with her parents and grandmother, who hold different views to her own. The producer spoke at the awards and said that most of the Russian actors did not return to their home country after fleeing at the outbreak of the war. It’s powerful.

Read more

I was, of course, more financially secure in full-time employment. But the happiness and freedom that come with working on my own terms — and on my own timeline — have been worth the trade-off. Building something independently that is entirely my own is slower, and in many ways messier, but it feels aligned in a way I didn’t anticipate.

Thank you for your patience as I find my rhythm here. I’m very much in the process of learning what it means to build a career on the internet without contorting myself to fit its demands, and while it can feel like a hinterland at times, progress — no matter how incremental — is still worth something.

I’m also excited to announce the plans that I have in store for my paid Substack subscribers (if you are one of them, thank you so much for supporting me). Something very special indeed will be announced in the coming weeks and I cannot wait to share it with you all.

In the meantime, please enjoy everything I’ve been loving and consuming this week.

I find myself feeling very skeptical of ‘It-girl’ authors, particularly as a millennial woman who was around during the halcyon days of Caroline Calloway (IYKYK). My favourite authors are typically media-shy and rarely acquiesce to publicity, so I approach buzzy literarati lists with caution. Madeline Cash, however, is a new-found exception to that rule.

I was sent a proof of Lost Lambs last year and, in one of my usual panicked tidying frenzies, swept it to the top of a bookshelf in my house, relegating it to the annals of my memory. That is, until — as all good thoughts are wont to do — it returned to me a few weeks ago as I was falling asleep. I must read that book! I thought to myself.

What I didn’t know, given my aversion to following or particularly engaging with literary ‘It-girls’ (I prefer to follow and engage on the basis of merit rather than cachet), was just how much of a cult following Cash has amassed. She’s the co-founder of Forever Magazine and the author of Earth Angels (2020), a collection of short stories.

She’s also, as I now know, the author of Lost Lambs — one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. It’s pithy, propulsive, and genuinely laugh-out-loud hilarious (a difficult feat for a novel, in my experience). I’ve found myself recommending Lost Lambs, Cash’s debut novel, to absolutely everybody who comes within an inch of me. I’ve also found myself both following — and thinking a lot about — Cash. In truth, I think she’s an exceptional storyteller and very much worthy of all of the praise she deservingly receives.

I am a true Type C woman in so many ways: everything I say must be just so, yet there’s very little method behind the madness in practice. One thing I will rarely relent on, however, is reading a book before indulging in any kind of adaptation of it. So when I saw the news of Netflix’s upcoming adaptation of Vladimir, Julia May Jonas’s 2022 novel, starring Rachel Weisz and Leo Woodall, I snapped up the book immediately.

It is truly one of the most astutely observed novels I’ve ever read. On the surface, Vladimir is about an older female academic who embarks on an affair with a younger colleague, but at its core it’s concerned with far more than that. It weaves a sharp, unsettling portrait of female rage, frustration, desire, and the politics of sex. I read it thinking, Vladimir walked so All Fours could run. It’s a phenomenally cinematic book — you can feel it unfolding in your mind as you read — so I’m beyond excited that I’ve only got a few weeks to wait before its debut on the streamer on March 5. Oh, and did I mention that it’s been adapted by Bad Sisters mastermind Sharon Horgan? As I said, I’m beyond excited.

As I made my way through the aforementioned pile of books marooned on the dust-lined top of my bookshelf, I came across The Correspondent by Virginia Evans — a novel housed in a dusty pink sleeve that I had clearly shoved aside without much thought. I can’t quite remember why I pulled it down to read, but something drew me to it (admittedly, it may have had something to do with the litany of stellar author blurbs peppering the jacket). I’m so glad it did. This book is such a sleeper hit that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how completely it seemingly slipped under my radar (although it has been named as a bestseller Stateside).

The epistolary novel, told through a series of letters and emails, offers an uncompromising glimpse into the inner life of seventy-three-year-old Sybil van Antwerp — her loves, regrets, and lingering guilt. It’s thoughtful and generous, and the way it gently plays with the hubris of youth and the wisdom of age feels really quietly magical. As I read it, I found myself seized by the urge to tell everyone I love exactly how much I love them.

I finished reading Hamnet while in Miami last October with my boyfriend. The tears that tumbled from my eyes when I closed the book were so fat and warm I didn’t even have to blink for them to fall; it felt like a kind of spiritual purge, a release of all the grief that Maggie O’Farrell so symphonically threads through the novel. As a result, I had high hopes for the film adaptation, directed by Chloé Zhao — whose work I love — and starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. The film has already been dubbed a clear frontrunner for the coveted Best Picture gong at the Academy Awards next month, with much of the conversation centring on its beauty.

And it is a beautiful film. I love the way Zhao uses natural vistas to communicate mood and foreshadowing, and I love her use of music to emotionally transport the viewer. The score, composed by Max Richter, is dazzling — I often found myself crying before a scene had even fully unfolded, simply because the music was so moving. Jessie Buckley was impeccably cast as Agnes Shakespeare, her performance is phenomenal and, in my view, entirely, utterly and totally worthy of the Oscar for Best Actress. Much like the book, the film offers a devastating, visceral depiction of love, loss, and life-altering grief.

That said, I just didn’t find the film as powerful or as impactful as the novel itself, whose complexity and nuance were always going to be difficult to translate verbatim to screen. Still, I watched it alongside my partner and friends who hadn’t read the book, and they adored it. Perhaps, for cinephiles encountering Hamnet for the first time, the experience of watching the film without having read the book mirrors the emotional force of reading it.

When I first read the list of nominees for this year’s Best Picture gong at the Oscars, I recognised all but Train Dreams, which I then learned is a Netflix adaptation of a 2011 Denis Johnson novella. It’s exactly the kind of film that I love; slow, sauntering, languorous.

The film, much like the book, tells of the life and inner world of Robert Grainier, played with remarkable restraint by Joel Edgerton. Set against the vast and changing landscapes of early 20th-century America, the film follows this itinerant logger and railroad worker through cycles of love, loss, solitude and the fleeting moments that make up a life.

The use of voiceovers, vast, sweeping natural vistas and simmering focus on Grainier’s inner world make for a truly poetic meditation on memory, mortality and connection to nature. Felicity Jones (an actress who I think is fantastic in everything) is dazzling as Gladys, Grainier’s adoring wife.

There is a definitive dearth of podcasts capable of filling the ginormous shoes left by The High-Low — the award-winning weekly show hosted by Pandora Sykes and Dolly Alderton that wrapped in 2020. That said, Australian podcast Shameless comes closer than most to replicating their astute observations on popular culture and modern life.

While I do think there’s an edge the Brits have (I’m pathetically biased here), Shameless is a breezy, intelligent listen — one I’ve found myself reaching for on morning walks. Marketed as a show ‘for smart people who love dumb stuff,’ it’s hosted by Melbourne-based journalists and authors Zara McDonald and Michelle Andrews. The podcast is consistently high-performing and, just a year after its launch, was named one of Apple’s best podcasts of the year.

I’ve been a journalist for the best part of a decade, writing for publications including The Guardian, British Vogue and ELLE. Over that time, I’ve watched legacy media become increasingly driven by speed, clicks and spectacle, often at the expense of considered thought, something I personally consider ought to be a cornerstone of all good and thorough journalism. Sensationalism is now prioritised above substance, and clicks are prioritised above care. It’s disillusioning — and it’s changing fast.

At the end of December 2025, I left my job at ELLE, where I’d been writing and editing culture, and stepped back into freelance life. This time, though, I’ve noticed that I feel less interested in job titles or traditional lanes. I’m not sure I want to be a ‘freelance writer’ so much as something looser and more intuitive: a cultural commentator, a recommender, a guide to the things that are actually worth people’s time.

Cultural Memory is my way of taking control of my voice, my words and my work. It’s a space for sharing the books, films, television, exhibitions and ideas that stay with me — alongside thoughts, feelings and experiences that shape how I engage with culture in the first place.

Even if just one person reads this, I’m happy to be writing again, freely and on my own terms. Thank you for being here. Below is the first Cultural Memory round‑up — a look at what I’ve been reading, watching and listening to this week, and what has stayed with me in the days since. I hope you enjoy it.

John of John

I’ve had quite the six weeks. I left my job, got engaged, turned 30, and was surprised with the holiday of a lifetime by my fiancé. As ever, I prepared a lengthy to‑be‑read pile for the break — but, as the saying goes, you make plans and G‑d laughs. In reality, I read far less than I’d hoped. Just one book, in fact — though it happened to be a bloody fantastic one.

That book was John of John, the hotly anticipated third novel by Douglas Stuart, one of my favourite authors. Stuart’s previous novels, Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, established him as a writer of haunting, precise prose — work that lingers, unsettles, and has the rare ability to submerge you entirely into the emotional interior of its characters. His writing on sexuality, poverty, religion, class and addiction is arresting, often devastating, and deeply humane.

John of John feels like a quiet evolution rather than a repetition of Stuart’s previous works. It follows John‑Calum Macleod, a young gay man returning to his family’s croft on the Isle of Harris after finishing art school in Edinburgh. The story explores his strained relationship with his father, John — a rigid, devout Presbyterian shepherd — and his maternal grandmother.

I found John of John less immediately arresting than Stuart’s first two novels, but still entirely compulsive. I finished it alone on a beach, long after the sun had gone down, and cried deep, shuddering guffaws of sadness. I find Stuart’s writing so moving because of how attuned it is to the complicated dynamics between parents and children, to that searing unconditional love that is so unbreakable but also so tender. His prose feels almost symphonic at times, and it remains among the most affecting being written today.

PRE-ORDER JOHN OF JOHN

Waves

Please keep reading if your preferred genre of film is an action‑packed, fast‑paced, blink‑and‑you’ll‑miss‑the‑punchline kind of thriller, because Waves is not that. One glance at the production company behind it — A24 — is usually enough for me to trust that I’m in good hands.

Waves is slow and deliberately unshowy, a meditation on the rhythms of life: how one moment you can be in one place, and the next somewhere else entirely. It follows an African‑American family in South Florida as they are forced to confront love, loss and forgiveness. At times, it drifts — even briefly loses its sense of purpose — but it’s also a quietly devastating, almost anti‑narrative film that simmers with tenderness.

Alexa Demie and Taylor Russell are both extraordinary, their performances raw and emotionally precise, while Sterling K. Brown is phenomenal as a domineering, conflicted father. One of my favourite films is Moonlight, and Waves echoes it in spirit — in its soft core, its emotional restraint, and its willingness to let feeling, rather than plot, do the heavy lifting.

WATCH WAVES

Nomadland

Before I watch Hamnet, I really wanted to watch Chloé Zhao’s most feted film Nomadlad, which won six Oscars in 2021. Much of Zhao’s earlier work - which established her as something of an indie film darling - focuses on the journey of outsiders within society, and Nomadland was her first foray into the same territory on a larger scale. It is the perfect reflection of how broken and damaged the concept of the American dream has become.

Based on the 2017 non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by journalist Jessica Bruder, it tells the story of older Americans who, following the 2008 financial crash, adopted a nomadic lifestyle, living in vans and RVs while working low-wage, zero-hour jobs. Frances McDormand provides the performance of a lifetime as Fern who, after the death of her husband and the economic collapse of her small town in Nevada, buys an RV and starts travelling the American West.

The heart of Nomadland isn’t just the sweeping vistas of cinematography - some of the most symbolic beautiful I’ve ever seen in a film - but rather the nomads themselves, who play versions of themselves in the film. The intention was for Nomadland to function as a cinematic, pseudo-documentary as it depicted the invisible casualties of America’s rampant and rabid obsession with modern capitalism. There were criticisms of the film being a glorification of poverty - I found this Reddit thread on the subject of the film particularly interesting - but I found Nomadland deeply, profoundly and earth-shatteringly moving.

WATCH NOMADLAND

The Eyes of Tammy Faye

I’m not sure I’ve ever actually watched Jessica Chastain in anything before, but she is marvelous in this film, which is based on the real-life rise and fall of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, the wife of disgraced televangelist and fraudster Jim Bakker (played with aplomb by Andrew Garfield). In fact, she’s simultaneously entirely believable and also laugh-out-loud funny. It’s a fantastic film that I cackled at, found really interesting and subsequently fell down a rabbit hole researching (I find the cult of Christianity fascinating).

The film is actually based on a 2000 documentary of Tammy Faye, which was narrated by RuPaul. Faye had become an icon among the LGBTQ+ community for her unwavering support for gay rights and people with Aids in the 1980s amid rampant homophobia from the Christian church and amid Ronald Reagan’s America. Jim fathers two children with Tammy Faye, but their relationship seriously lacks intimacy, instead with Jim preferring to blow off steam by fooling around with his male assistant. The film also suggests that the famous TV preacher Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio) fanned the flames of the scandal that eventually brought the Bakkers down, so that he could step in and take over their media empire. Anyhow, it’s an amazing film of the rise and subsequent fall of a couple I’d never heard of before but am now infinitely interested in.

WATCH THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE

I Love LA

When Rachel Sennott pitched I Love LA to HBO, she reportedly described it as ‘Entourage for internet girls’ — a line I can’t stop thinking about. For me, it perfectly captures the show’s appeal: an irreverent mirror held up to the absurdity of life online.

If Sex and the City belonged to Gen X, I Love LA feels made for Zillennials — that in‑between generation who remember a world before the internet, but have spent their adult lives shaped by it. Loosely based on Sennott’s own move from New York to Los Angeles, the series follows Maia, an entertainment manager desperately trying to turn her only client — and former best friend — Tallulah (Odessa A’zion) into an influencer.

What follows is an eight‑episode run teeming with pithy, laugh‑out‑loud riffs on the internet age: earnest conversations about brand deals, references to Erewhon and Chateau Marmont, and so many internet It‑girl cameos that it’s almost worth watching for those alone.

It’s Girls if it were made in 2026 — sharper, more self‑aware, and jokingly in-touch with the strange economy of attention we’re all now living inside. I loved it.

WATCH I LOVE LA

Members Only: Palm Beach

I am an unapologetic and die-hard fan of Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise, but I have never seen anything as camp as Netflix’s new fly-on-the-wall reality series of a quintet of glamorous Palm Beach dwellers who frequent Mar-a-Lago and are hell-bent on drinking as much ‘Palm Beach water’ (read: champagne) as humanly possible.

As all good reality TV shows tend to do, Members Only: Palm Beach focusses on one rags-to-riches tale. It tells the story of Uzbekistani businesswoman Ro-mina who moves from Philadelphia to the wealthy Floridian enclave with hopes of entering the upper echelons of Palm Beach society. It is so frothy and silly that you can’t take it at all seriously - especially the larger-than-life ‘Grand Dame’ of Palm Beach, Gale Brophy. I binged the entire eight-episode series in one sitting and I don’t see how you couldn’t. A heavenly binge-watch (even if slightly dark at the way it glorifies proximity to Donald Trump).

WATCH MEMBERS ONLY: PALM BEACH