Does Oversharing Ruin Female Dignity? I recently read a brilliant Substack piece by Tova Sterling who asked herself this question (read here). She reflected, more eloquently than I ever could, on the antinomy between unflinchingly sincere content creation and the dangerous parasocial effects of processing one’s feelings publicly. To contextualize this for people who, unlike me, are not chronically online, Tova Sterling’s article was a direct answer to alt-right influencer Brittany Venti’s video essay, which tried to shame sexually explicit writing produced by women. Her right-wing piece (of shit!) was titled “Oversharing Ruined Female Dignity” – and as my queen Tova acknowledged – while the video content itself was an uninsightful misogynist slop – the opening phrase in isolation was nonetheless worth rescuing. ...
Spinning and Other Existential Mistakes Last Friday night, a terrifying existential insight struck me – and it happened during an already terrifying activity: spinning class. Across from me, the fitness coach was cycling with a hypnotizingly equal cadence. All around, gym-goers were dripping sweat, electrolytes and dignity. And just when I thought the cardio was approaching its grand finale, my heart rate took an unauthorized swerve upwards. “There is only one really serious philosophical problem,” Albert Camus once thought – and that is the question of whether life is worth living. ...
In A Lover’s Discourse, my boy Roland Barthes describes the miserable trap of interpreting signs: But for me, an amorous subject, everything which is new, everything which disturbs, is received not as a fact but in the aspect of a sign which must be interpreted […] If the other has given me this new telephone number, what was that the sign of? Was it an invitation to telephone right away, for the pleasure of the call, or only should the occasion arise, out of necessity? ...
Happy New Year, my faithful readers! While your girl has been busy with some end-of-year / early-January blues, I do hope your holiday season has been as tranquil as the rich Southern matriarch Victoria from The White Lotus (when on her pills), that your friends and family showed you more affection than a love-bomber on a second date, and that your plates were as full as if it was my Bulgarian grandma filling them up for my American brother-in-law. ...
It’s December 23rd, I’m waiting for my plane to take off from the Paris CDG airport, lifting me towards my hometown for the Christmas holidays. “Girl you sweet like Fanta, Fanta” is banging in my AirPods for about 15 seconds before I anxiously switch to another short musical blurb, and then another. Whenever I find myself in a particular state of mind, when my thoughts are short, uneasy, frantically jumping from one to the other, inevitably, my Spotify playlist follows. ...
Sorry to trouble you was how the note began, which is such a great opener. Please, trouble me! Trouble me! I’ve been waiting my whole life to be troubled by a note like this! The very first lines of Miranda July’s second novel All Fours quickly got under my skin. It was early February of 2025 and while I was in a bookstore in Wellington, New Zealand, I was carefully reading the first pages all books that made the finals of my pre-selection process. All Fours’s beginning most intensely left me wanting more. ...
Would Kierkegaard say Roland Barthes Was Anxiously Attached? In reflecting on the Adorable, the unique quality that draws us to our objects of desire, 20th-century French theorist Roland Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse: Herein a great enigma, to which I shall never possess the key: Why is it that I desire So-and-so? Why is it that I desire So-and-so lastingly, longingly? Or to paraphrase it the way Sex and the City protagonist Carrie Bradshaw would have said it: I couldn’t help but wonder… Why am I utterly and ridiculously obsessed with Mr. Big? ...
Badass women are running the political stage in a pre-colonial-Filipino-inspired universe. Let me tell you about Black Salt Queen, my summer read that got me back into reading contemporary fantasy. ⚠️ Contains spoilers! Let me first start off by saying that I am no fantasy genre expert. When I read for pleasure I tend to gravitate more towards family sagas, coming-of-age novels and classics. Yet, of course, my taste in books is an ever-changing mish-mash of genres, rivaled in its inconsistency only by my 2025 Spotify Wrapped. From John Steinbeck to Miranda July, and from books on eels to landscape architecture academia, the most important and unifying feature of my preferences as a reader is simple: I take recommendations seriously. IRL. From friends and foe, but not from Goodreads algorithms! ...
“Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week I’m trying to make you feel worse about life, even though life makes you feel worse about life, every week.” It is on this optimistic, high-vibe note that my favorite host, Robert Evans, welcomes listeners. And don’t you dare expect things to be any less grim in this article! Produced by Cool Zone Media, Behind the Bastards delves into the lives of some of the worst people to have ever plagued humanity and marks more than a million downloads monthly. ...
As I am starting to write, I have no answer in mind. The Bulgarian Ergen is our national version of the American reality TV show The Bachelor– a show that runs on a fundamentally offensive premise. Namely, that a plethora of drop dead gorgeous women need to audition for one single male, who ultimately decides which one he wants to marry. In this fabricated TV environment, women tend to transform into these unwatchable, needy, kiss-assy creatures, while the male is portrayed as a God to be put on a pedestal. ...