Afleveringen
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The great rom-com stars make it look easy. Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore: When they fall in love on-screen, their charm pulls us in and the transparency of their emotions enables us to feel every moment of yearning and every thrill just as their characters do. But a rom-com lead can also, we recently discovered, turn in such a limp performance that it makes the sheer difficulty of being a rom-com lead obvious. Sydney Sweeney is a good actress, and she was surely trying to put in a rousing performance as the female lead ofthe recent film “Anyone But You.” It just doesn’t work.
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Dearest gentle reader…
In the words of our dear gossip-monger Lady Whistledown, “Diamonds are not the only gems that sparkle.” On this season of “Bridgerton,” we are given an emerald, in the form of a no-longer-citrus-clad Penelope Featherington. The former wallflower is in full bloom, catching the eyes of both naturalist Lo…
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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“Selling the O.C.” has always distinguished itself from its older, cooler sister “Selling Sunset” by being slightly worse in almost every respect: the fashion, the characters, the politics, the drama. In season 3, that continues. The “Love Island”-inspired, Shein-designed outfits, the flatly unpleasant people, the thinly veiled bigotries, and the warmed-over storylines make for an uninspiring season. Still worse, the biggest central stories now seem irrelevant, given how many key characters have left the show since this season filmed.
But “Selling the O.C.” does offer one thing “Selling Sunset” does not: sheer villain volume. Everyone who has briefly won our sympathy on this show immediately loses it (except perhaps Brandi, who has effectively sidelined herself from the drama this go-around). The most likable characters onscreen often turn out to have the most heinous politics, and even the more sympathetic figures often have pretty unpleasant vibes themselves. There’s not a Chrishell in this bunch, folks. It’s mean girls and a*****e bros all the way down.
In this episode, we discuss the alarmingly flammable-looking fashion; the abysmal race, class and gender politics; the Alex Hall-Tyler Stanaland will-they-won’t-they flirtation that just won’t end; and the gay panic that appears to have blown up the cast. We hope you enjoy!
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Are we in the golden age of friend-group Bravo shows? After doing a major binge of established shows “Summer House,” “Vanderpump Rules,” and new addition “The Valley,” we think that answer is a resounding yes. So naturally, we had to get of back on the Rich Text pod to do a little state of the Bravo union.
All three of the aforementioned shows track th…
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Taylor Swift’s 11th original studio album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” was released last week into a world feverishly gripped by anticipation for a Taylor Swift album. Some were primed to adore her latest work, which Swifties broadly expected to be a thorough excavation of her relationship with her ex-partner of six years, actor Joe Alwyn; others were primed to mock and flame it. We, two rather casual Swift fans, were drawn in by the sheer intensity of the gathering discourse — not to mention our own anticipation of another album. And after almost a week of listening and relistening to the album, following the critical reactions to it, and stewing in the public debates raging about it, we decided we were ready to wade in.
We are joined by culture critic B.D. McClay of Notebook for this conversation!
Further Reading + Listening:
“Taylor Swift Still Isn’t Your Friend,” B.D. McClay’s 2023 Slate essay about the controversy surrounding Taylor’s relationship with Matty Healy
“Taylor Swift Derangement Syndrome with B.D. McClay,” Know Your Enemy pod
"Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets' is written in blood," Ann Powers, NPR
“Come for the Torture, Stay for the Poetry: This Might Be Taylor Swift’s Most Personal Album Yet,” Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone
“Taylor Swift seems sick of being everyone’s best friend,” Constance Grady, Vox
“The Real Reason Taylor Swift Dresses Like That,” Cathy Horyn, NYMag
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It was sometime last year that it started to feel like Big Conversations about marriage and divorce were *everywhere.*
David Brooks was lecturing young people to “obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage” because marriage rates have been falling. Emily Gould was contemplating leaving her husband and then not over on The Cut. …
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Last week, New York Magazine’s The Cut published an all-time banger of a hate read — which is saying something, considering the run they’ve been on recently (from the “$50k in a shoebox” piece to the “tried to leave my husband and then realized I was just having a breakdown” piece). Grazie Sophia Christie’s floridly written and smugly framed essay, “The Case for Marrying an Older Man,” argues, with all the wisdom and certainty earned through 27 years on earth and 4 years of marriage, that leveraging youth and beauty to marry an older man is a cheat code for women, who are otherwise condemned to years of miserable labor alongside insufficient same-age partners.
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One of the first things you notice about “Irish Wish,” the latest output of Lindsay Lohan’s deal with Netflix, is just how… saturated the colors are. The pink accents in her plaid knee-length dress look a little too pink. The green grass of the Irish countryside is a little too green. The blue of the water is a little too blue. Are we in Ireland at all, you start to wonder? Is that real clothing? Are those real human beings? Is this all a simulation? And why in god’s name is Ayesha Curry there?
We needed reinforcements to properly unpack why this movie shook us to our cores and also made us laugh so very much. Luckily, Nora McInerny was game to talk it all through.
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Nearly three months after the last official appearance of Catherine, the Princess of Wales, and following approximately 17 waves of fevered speculation about the cause of her unusually long absence from the public eye, we decided it was time to dedicate an episode to KateGate. Sara Petersen of In Pursuit of Clean Countertops joined us to recap the timeline of events since this PR mess first began brewing, to discuss a few of the major theories behind her absence, and — most importantly — to unpack the seductiveness of this particular path down the rabbit hole.
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It only took six seasons of “Love Is Blind” for Netflix and Kinetic to get Nick and Vanessa Lachey some real media training. At long last, our fair hosts seem to have discovered the power of a follow-up question! (They did seem to basically forget to ask about the majority of Jimmy and Chelsea’s relationship, but… baby steps.)
This year’s reunion had som…
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SPOILER ALERT: This post contains some spoilers for the finale of season 6 of “Love Is Blind.”
The Charlotte-based “Love Is Blind” season that started out so promisingly is looking pretty diminished by the finale — at least when you’re counting couples. Season 6 ended up being as short on weddings as season 5, and similarly gave us…
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Just when we thought things had reached peak insanity on season 6 of “Love Is Blind,” receipts pointing to some questionable off-screen behavior of cast members started popping up all over TikTok.
Full disclosure! We taped our recap of episodes 10 and 11 last week, but then the gossip started pouring out: about Jeramey’s pre…
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On this week’s pod, we recap episodes 7-9 of “Love Is Blind” season 6, which has begun to take some unexpected twists after a strong opening. Though the first drop of “Love Is Blind” episodes ended in a grim place, with at least two of the five engaged pairs collapsing into conflict within hours of attending their first social fun…
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Season 6 of Netflix’s “Love Is Blind” dropped its first six episodes on Valentine’s Day, and (obviously) we binged them all. The verdict? So far, so good.
After an absolutely disastrous season 5, which left multiple lawsuits in its wake, and two couples fully erased from the season, we were wary heading into season 6. But six…
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this week on the pod, we discuss the first six episodes of season two of “The Traitors.” Hosted by Alan Cumming and his Scottish sparklecore wardrobe — a seemingly endless array of kilts in bold colors, structural sleeves, and rhinestone-studded ensembles — “The Traitors” takes 22 reality show contestants, athletes, and a former member of the English Parliament, and throws them into a gussied-up game of Mafia.
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“What is the penis to me? What is its nature?” Jacqueline Novak asks early in her show, “Get On Your Knees.” After some consideration she concludes that the penis is tender, responsive, and has “the soul of an artist.”
Like the organ it explores, “Get On Your Knees” has a tenderness at its center, wrapped in a package of genital humor.
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Just when you thought “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” would never be able to top the moment when federal agents tried to arrest Jen Shah during filming, the season 4 finale raised the bar to the heavens, delivering a finale as shocking and suspenseful as a scripted thriller.
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Content warning: We will be discussing infertility and IVF during this episode. If those topics are sensitive for you right now, we totally understand. Feel free to skip this week’s episode. Take care of yourselves, first and foremost.
When Sami Jacobson decided to start trying to have a baby, she was 33, and, anxieties assuaged by a doctor friend, she figured, “it’ll just happen.” But then… it didn’t.
Now, at 37, she and her husband are in the middle of one of the least-discussed fertility interventions — something that New York Magazine termed “the last fertility taboo” back in April: egg donor-assisted IVF.
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This week, we finally got around to discussing the movie everyone has been talking about: “May December,” a film “loosely inspired” by the Mary Kay Letourneau-Vili case. Directed by Todd Haynes and written by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik, it stars Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry, an actress researching her role playing Gracie A…
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FBoy? F, Hi. Again!
After being unceremoniously axed by MAX in 2022, our favorite, innovative reality dating show has made a moderately triumphant comeback. “FBoy Island,” a show from the creative brain of former “Bachelor” EP Elan Gale, just wrapped up its third season on The CW, and boy do we have thoughts.
First, there’s t…
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