Content Consumed: Sex and the City, Righteous Gemstones, Utopia, Quarterlife, and more

Hey, Content Consumers! I hope you’ve had a wonderful start to your week.

Catch up on your emails, then catch up on Content Consumed. Last week, I reviewed Barbie and Oppenheimer and gave you all the most important details (yep, that movie’s getting delayed) on the SAG/WGA strikes.

And today, we’re chitchatting about…
🫦 I finally started Sex and the City—and I get it now
💥 A wild Righteous Gemstones season three finale
🎧 Notes on Travis Scott’s new album, Utopia
🧨 Book review: HHhH (no, not a typo)
💌 Book chat: Quarterlife
📚 My August bookshelf

I finally watched Sex and the City

Please, don’t gasp. It’s true: I’ve never watched the iconic television show Sex and the City.

Until last Friday. And now, naturally, I’m halfway through season 2.

I took some notes during the first few episodes:

• The theme song really does go hard. I get it.
• I can imagine this cast feuding with each other. Kim Cattrall: I understand you.
• Sarah Jessica Parker looks very different than I expected in the first episode. Short ringlet hair, dark features and makeup, grungy fits: not what I expected, but definitely late ‘90s.
• These topics must’ve been so high-level, edgy, and rebellious at this point in America. Sleeping with married men, sex tapes, age gaps, and more are all touched on in the first three episodes.
• I love a show that serves as a time capsule. I can’t imagine much better than Season One of Sex and the City to illustrate the late ’90s in NYC. (Okay, Friends too, Seinfeld, etc… you get my point though.) It’s all a lot grungier than I thought it would be, but I’m sure that will change over the seasons as we head into the early-aughts.
• Well, I can see why Samantha is everyone’s favorite. Also, Stanford is such a stereotype, but I don’t think it’s in a particularly offensive way.
• The most insane line of the first episode: Mr. Big being called “the next Donald Trump” by Samantha. Yikes!!!
• I’m not a Mr. Big fan. Why is his hand wave so creepy? Why is he constantly negging Carrie? Just being mean to her. What the hell is this, are we supposed to be dazzled by this man?
• The jazz music gives the show such a different vibe than I expected. I think I expected more lyrical, pop background music to go with montages.
• Carrie smokes cigs everywhere. Like, is this girlie not worried about getting ash on her bed? She even starts a paragraph in her sex column with “As I searched for my Marlboro Light…”
• How does Mr. Big keep tracking her down every DAY? Wild. Creepy.
• Okay, my second favorite line from the first few episodes compares the “war” between married and single people to the war in NORTHERN IRELAND. Absurd. This show’s crazy.

So, yes, I will watch this show to the very end, and probably all the movies. Actually, maybe not the movies if Samantha isn’t in them. I heard And Just Like That is really bad but there’s a chance I give it a shot later.

Righteous Gemstones: The Season Three finale

Whew. What a ride. Righteous Gemstones ended their third season with a bang.

While I didn’t love the last scene—you can’t tell me Peter could’ve actually survived that explosion and they’re all happy together now—I loved the entire episode leading up to it. And the penultimate episode, also released on Sunday.

Some notable moments, in no particular order: Baby Billie’s Bible Bonkers was greenlit. Kelvin and Keefe smooched. Peter lost control of his brigade of lunatic Christian white nationalist militiamen. The siblings struggle to forgive Eli for not paying their ransom. BJ and Judy have a real perverse—yet bonding?—helicopter moment. Jesse’s chops go from black to grey. The Simkins, as expected, don’t actually matter that much. Total red herring. There’s a big explosion, then an even bigger explosion.

But the most notable: a Biblical swarm of locusts. This swarm changes everything: it shines a light on relationships and alters plans. It’s a happy ending… until one more locust lands on Peter, and he tears off the bomb switch on his hand to shoo it away… activating the bomb.

But he survives, somehow, after driving the bomb-strapped truck away from the ministry. Then, the whole family is happy together, with Aimee-Leigh watching over them as a ghost (which looks a lot like the hologram that Eli was hell-bent on destroying).

Wild stuff. A pretty good season altogether.

Travis Scott’s new album just dropped

Welcome to Utopia, the follow-up to Astroworld (great album, horrific festival).

It’s a very Travis Scott album with very obvious producing influences. Without doing a morsel of research, I knew that “THANK GOD” and “MODERN JAM” were pieced together using throwaway beats from Kanye’s iconic Yeezus. Apparently “GOD’S COUNTRY” was supposed to be on Donda. “MY EYES” is certainly a Frank Ocean flow. Common collaborators like SZA make appearances. It’s all familiar to fans of the genre, so it’s easy to settle in and hit play.

My main critique would be that the tracks aren’t exactly… cohesive together. I admire each song for what it is, but I agree with the critics who say that it feels somewhat piece-mealed.

But I’ll keep listening. It’s not Astroworld but it’s still a good album.

Disclaimer: Separating the art from the artist in this column today. If you wanna talk about Travis Scott, Astroworld, and the aftermath—I’m not doing it right here and now!

Book review: “HHhH”

I’ll get this out right away: This is my favorite book I’ve read all year.

As a fan of history, Prague, memoirs, writing, smaller-scale WWII stories, creative novel formatting, genre crossover, and witty asides… it’s incredible. It’s easily going on my Top 10 of All Time list.

I actually struggle to place this book in a genre. Laurent Binet, the French author, originally wrote the book in 2010. It’s since been translated into English, which was how I got my hands on it. And it’s his debut novel!!! The most creatively inspiring book I’ve read in years.

HHhH recounts Operation Anthropoid, the assassination of Nazi leader (and Final Solution architect) Reinhard Heydrich in Prague during World War II. But it’s so much more than that.

I almost don’t want to tell you more because I want you to experience it all yourself. I hope I’m not overhyping it. But my husband started reading it a couple of days ago… and I’m pretty sure he confirmed that I didn’t overhype it.

Read HHhH. Read it now. A perfect 5 stars.

Book chat: “Quarterlife”

So, I read this self-help book—and I’m not normally a self-help book girlie, but may become one—called Quarterlife last week.

The premise: We need to address the Quarterlifers, the men and women between the ages of 16–36, who are struggling. We Quarterlifers usually fall into two categories: Stability types and Meaning types.

Some people have done everything “right”: graduate, get a job, meet a partner. Yet they are unfulfilled and unclear on what to do next. These are “Stability Types.”

Others are uninterested in this prescribed path but feel unmoored. They are more inclined to pursue meaning and have found themselves at odds with social expectations for this stage of life. These are “Meaning Types.”

I’m definitely a Stability type. Probably 80% Stability, 20% Meaning. A very easy example of this: I recently found a Google Doc from 2018 that laid out, step-by-step, a 10-year life plan.

(And honestly… I wasn’t too far off. My husband proposed one year earlier than expected and I think we’ll be moving to Europe one year later than expected. I nailed it, honestly.)

But I have a harder time with Meaning and it’s only really just hit me. What’s next? Am I supposed to buy a house now? Is my career path actually right for me? Am I cultivating the right relationships in my personal life? I feel like I had answers to all of these questions up until recently. I think right after we got married was when I really had to stop and ask myself: is life all about checking boxes? What’s beyond that, what’s the deeper meaning of it?

Anyways, as you can probably tell, this book put me in a spiral. But in a good way. Author Satya Doyle Byock, a Portland-based psychotherapist who I desperately wish had room in her calendar for me, also offers four pillars of Quarterlife development to examine. I don’t know how much the pillars will help. They were a bit vague, even with plenty of anecdotal examples. But how personal can you get in this kind of book anyways?

A solid 4 stars from me. Give it a go if you’re also a Quarterlifer asking yourself: Is there more?

My August bookshelf

I’ve got a lot to read. Here’s what I’m most excited about in August:

Mobility by Lydia Kiesling
This has been on my list the longest.
The premise: The year is 1998. The Soviet Union is dissolved, the Cold War is over, and Bunny Glenn is a lonely American teenager in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family. Through Bunny’s bemused eyes, we watch global interests flock to her temporary backyard for Caspian oil and pipeline access, hearing rumbles of the expansion of the American security state and the buildup to the War on Terror. We follow Bunny from adolescence to middle age — from Baku to Athens to Houston — as her own ambition and desire for comfort lead her to a career in the oil industry, eventually returning to the scene of her youth, where slippery figures from the past reappear in an era of political and climate breakdown.

After the Funeral and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley
I’ve been wanting to read more short story collections as I work on one myself.
The premise: In each of these twelve stories, small events have huge consequences. Heloise’s father died in a car crash when she was alittle girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognize each other. Janie’s bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie’s own age — everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend’s death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend’s wife. Cecilia, a teenager, wakes one morning in Florence on vacation with her parents and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.

Strip Tees by Kate Flannery
A juicy memoir with a lot of hype, about the early days of American Apparel.
The premise: In Los Angeles, Kate Flannery arrives with a Seven Sisters diploma in hand and a new job at an upstart clothing company called American Apparel. Kate throws herself into the work, determined to climb the corporate fashion ladder. Having a job at American Apparel also means being a part of the advertising campaigns themselves, stripping down in the name of feminism. She slowly begins to lose herself in a landscape of rowdy sex-positivity, racy photo shoots, and a cultlike devotion to the unorthodox CEO and founder of the brand. The line between sexual liberation and exploitation quickly grows hazy, leading Kate to question the company’s ethics and wrestle with her own.

Hope by Andrew Ridker
This one’s supposed to be witty and fascinating. I’m in the middle of the first chapter and I can confirm that.
The premise: The year is 2013 and the Greenspans are the envy of Brookline, Massachusetts, an idyllic (and idealistic) suburb west of Boston. Scott Greenspan is a successful physician with his own cardiology practice. His wife, Deb, is a pillar of the community who spends her free time helping resettle refugees. Their daughter, Maya, works at a distinguished New York publishing house and their son, Gideon, is preparing to follow in his father’s footsteps. They are an exceptional family from an exceptional place, living in exceptional times. But when Scott is caught falsifying blood samples at work, he sets in motion a series of scandals that threatens to shatter his family. Deb leaves him for a female power broker; Maya rekindles a hazardous affair from her youth; and Gideon drops out of college to go on a dangerous journey that will put his principles to the test.

Let me know if you’ve already read one of these—or if you’re planning on it! Let’s book club it.

And that’s it for this edition of Content Consumed! Thanks so much for reading. I appreciate you!

Cheers,
Casey

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