I don’t have a daughter, but Instagram sure thinks I do. I blame my birthday weekend, back in May. That’s when I was surrounded by women who are the parents of children between the ages of 2 and 7, which meant my phone was hanging out with their phone, my Instagram near their Instagram, and the dark tubes of the internet that communicate to one another about potential shared consumer interests started serving me the ads for Mother-Daughter dress ads that have since filled my feed.
Some are higher-end. Some are from Target. There are a bunch of those brands with good lighting and racially diverse models who somehow all have the same breast size that you only see on Instagram. Maisonette. Doen. Mark and Spencer. Pehr. Christy Dawn. Rolee. One Loved Babe. Alix Cherry. Marks and Spencer. Hillhouse. There are sets from Anthropologie, and Reformation, and LuLaRoe. I asked people to send me Instagram ads when they spotted them in their own feeds, and I received hundreds. They are flowy and floral. Feminine and wistful and demure. And they reach full expression in the Nap Dress.
Till today, colonial-era laws that ban homosexuality continue to exist in former British territories including parts of Africa and Oceania.
But it is in Asia where they have had a significantly widespread impact. This is the region where, before India legalised homosexual sex in 2018, at least one billion people lived with anti-LGBTQ legislation.
For me, the pleasure of poring over a physical menu is so integral to the experience of dining out that I made my friends mimic it during an early-pandemic dinner over Zoom. We’ve all just had the most isolated, screen-mediated year of our lives. If there’s an opportunity for us to make a familiar social interaction more tangible and human, and less coldly transactional, let’s take it.
He’s here to tell a story, in take-it-or-leave-it Elmore Leonard fashion, and to make room along the way to talk about some of the things he cares about — old movies, male camaraderie, revenge and redemption, music and style. He gets it: Pop culture is what America has instead of mythology. He got bitten early by this notion, and he’s stayed bitten.
Chapters have the propulsive thrust of anecdotes; his exuberant excess is the dominant charm. Far from being the throwaway artifact it sometimes pretends to be, Tarantino’s first novel may even, as he’s hinted, herald the start of a new direction for this relentlessly inventive director.
Francine Prose writes sentences that make me laugh out loud. Her insights, the subtle ones and the two-by-fours, make me shake my head in despair, in surprise, in heartfelt agreement. The gift of her work to a reader is to create for us what she creates for her protagonist: the subtle unfolding, the moment-by-moment process of discovery as we read and change, from not knowing and even not wanting to know or care, to seeing what we had not seen and finding our way to the light of the ending.
What really sets McHugh apart, though, is that her social novels are seasoned with gothic horror. Each of them has kept me reading late into the night and left me chilled by their revelations. The mountains and hollows of Arkansas are gorgeous, but there be monsters in those hills.
For a thriller that starts off with two strikes against it, Riley Sager’s “Survive the Night” turns out to be a first-rate read. The strikes? First, Sager asks readers to believe that a young woman obsessed with her roommate’s murder would get into a car with a stranger. Second, a young woman stuck in a car with scary stranger is an overused trope of crime fiction. We’ve seen this movie before.
That may be so, Sager seems to be telling us, but you haven’t seen anybody do it like this.
I’ve been thinking about things lifted
into the sky. Szymborska gets lung cancer
and is whisked into the clouds. Muhammad Ali
floats the way he always said he would, but this time,