Content Consumed: The Crown, Amy Poehler, and EmRata’s podcast

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Content Consumed

7 min readOct 20, 2022

Gooood mornin’! Life has been extremely overwhelming lately. But we carry on.

In today’s edition of Content Consumed:
🤭 Amy Poehler’s memoir isn’t what I remembered
🎙 EmRata’s starting a podcast
👑 Fine! I’ll watch The Crown
🧵 SheIn’s resale website… is kind of fake
📬 First take: Semafor

I was wrong about Amy Poehler’s memoir

When I was in early high school and Amy Poehler’s memoir Yes Please dropped, I snagged a copy as soon as possible.

She was Amy Poehler! SNL god and Parks and Rec queen! I vaguely remember (this is key) reading her memoir and enjoying it thoroughly, thinking it provided great anecdotes of her time in comedy and important life lessons.

Claire and Ashley of Celebrity Memoir Book Club brought me back down to Earth yesterday. This week’s podcast focused on (1) Yes Please and (2) disappointing young me. They understood though, telling listeners at the beginning of the pod: we know this was probably something you loved when you were younger and it first came out, but this is an objectively bad memoir.

The top 3 issues with Amy Poehler’s memoir: listicles, Louis C.K. in every chapter, and extreme lack of depth. Some of her more egregious mistakes in this book… well, look, obviously #1 is being best friends with Louis C.K. (this was published in 2014, for anyone wondering, right before *everything*) and singing his praises in nearly every chapter.

Then, when she has the opportunity to address big life moments that might have emotional insight and reflection, they usually appear as listicles. Her divorce from Will Arnett, her husband of over a decade, barely received a mention. Most of it became a joke-y listicle, except for one tiny bit I thought was important:

“Imagine spreading everything you care about on a blanket and then tossing the whole thing up in the air. The process of divorce is about loading that blanket, throwing it up, watching it all spin, and worrying what stuff will break when it lands.”

Overall, the book is just dated. There are some classic SNL-style non-PC jokes, it’s all very obviously pre-#MeToo, and Nick Kroll gets heavy mentions as her long-term boyfriend (he is now married to another woman and they have a kid).

EmRata’s starting a podcast

Not to brag, but I’ve got a pretty good podcast lineup going. I’ll share my full roster at the end of this section. But shall I be adding Emily Ratajkowski’s new pod to my list?

In a new profile with Harper’s Bazaar, EmRata revealed her podcastin’ plans. It’ll be called High Low with EmRata and launch on November 1. She says she pitched it as if Call Her Daddy met Fresh Air (fascinating and questionable).

What you can expect:

Chitchat about “sex, being a millennial or whatever…”
Two episodes a week, plus an additional weekly episode for paid subscribers.
One of the weekly episodes will be an interview and the other a solo monologue by EmRata.
She’ll invite a mix of guests, both “high and low,” she says, bringing together experts and celebrities, intellectuals and entertainers.
Her monologues, “a philosophical attempt to address a question”, will be called “EmRata Asks.” She’s already recorded one on the topic: “Can you be a feminist and still get plastic surgery?”

Listen, I’ll give it a go. Just for you guys!

Anyways, my current line-up of podcasts, for the curious:
- BBC’s Global News Podcast (news)
- NPR’s Up First (news)
- Chicks in the Office (pop culture)
- Trillionaire Mindset (banter)
- Celebrity Memoir Book Club (pop culture)
- Circling Back (banter)
- Too Much Dip (sports)
- The Always Sunny Podcast (TV)
- Oysters, Clams and Cockles (TV)
- F1: Chequered Flag from the BBC (sports)
- Brooke and Connor Make a Podcast (banter)

Fine, I’ll watch The Crown

Do I have to watch the first four seasons to start Season 5? Lmk.

Because the Season 5 trailer was a banger.

The casting’s had me excited for a while. Imelda Staunton as Queen Lizzie, Jonathan Pryce as Prince Phillip, Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana, and Dominic West as Prince Charles—it doesn’t get much better than that. Add in the chaos of the Camilla affair (with Olivia Williams playing Camilla Parker Bowles) and it’s a beautiful web of talented actors playing complex, real-life characters.

It’ll reveal the cringiest moments of 90s monarchy drama, from the tampon phone call leak to the palace’s public battle with Diana and the constitutional crisis of royal divorce.

Of course, the biggest concerns from cast and crew have very publicly been how they handle Diana’s enormous public figure and her tragic early death. Reports say that the car crash will not be recreated, but the run-up to the accident (…I wonder if they’ll allude to any conspiracies, but doubt it…) and the aftermath will be detailed on-screen.

Again… do I need to watch the first 4 seasons to hop in here? Like, how much time do I need to set aside for bingeing The Crown next week?

SheIn’s fake resale platform

SheIn, after a horrendous exposé was released last week about their labor conditions, is launching a “resale platform”. The new site, called Shein Exchange, will feature peer-to-peer resale (of some of the cheapest clothes made on Earth).

Except… it’s kind of fake.

It technically won’t require the production of any new merchandise but will be used for market research. Essentially, Shein is using data from secondhand sales to inform what to reproduce. Production, overall, will not slow.

“It’s doubtful how much value secondhand SheIn clothes even hold,” one fashion sustainability expert wrote. “They’re cheaper than most secondhand clothing and of such low quality that it’s unlikely they’ll survive multiple owners.”

Another expert wrote: “I am fully cynical about this and see this as an attempt to use greenwashing language coupled with an opportunity to justify the creation of more, unnecessary products in the name of research. What would be revolutionary would be making a commitment to reduce production and daily drops, and investing in making better quality pieces while paying a fair, living wage.”

I’ve bought from SheIn, mostly as a broke college student. I can confirm the clothes are cheap and wouldn’t last through many resales. SheIn’s move here feels desperate and won’t work.

First take: Semafor

A new media source has risen this week online: Semafor, from the minds of Buzzfeed News / NYT’s Ben Smith and Bloomberg’s Justin Smith.

Their approach is summed up in three phrases: transparent news, distilled views, and global perspectives. They believe the biggest issue in media right now is polarization, and the solution is to reduce polarization. Makes sense!

Their site is aggressive and built for fans of broadsheet journalism. It’s possibly an overwhelming amount of text. Nothing flashy here, except maybe their right-column map and pale yellow background. Beneath that map, a single-paragraph summary of today’s stories. On the left side, breaking news stories are ordered chronologically. In the middle, just 7 stories the editorial team wants you to read today.

I also subscribed to their newsletter to see what that was like. It’s very similar in design, except arguably more spaced-out and digestible. I like how each story is laid out and written, simply but with the facts and the opportunity to dive deeper.

But can any media outlet really be unbiased?

One columnist from Defector writes: “Semafor clearly wants to be seen as straddling divides — those between progressive and conservative, new journalism ethics and traditional conventions, fact, and opinion. In content, scope, and tone, however, its output so far is basically identical to that of any number of existing news organizations.”

I’ll keep you updated on my thoughts as I continue to receive daily newsletters from Semafor.