The internet thinks J.K. Rowling’s house is infested with black mold - let's discuss
It's Tuesday, let's talk shit
I recently started a Tuesday edition of the newsletter which is basically a roundup of all the interesting culture things that have happened over the last week. You’ll still have long reads every Thursday BUT, as I’ve been threatening to do for months, those will soon be behind a paywall, so be sure to upgrade to a paid plan to support my work — they cost the equivalent of buying me a very bad coffee once a month!
Kehlani just ruined my week. I made a decision a long time ago never to invest emotionally in celebrities and Kehlani was the last Famous Person™ who I truly believed was committed to the politics they claimed. So seeing them still buddied up with known bastard, woman-beater and all-round loser Chris Brown (especially after making a huge stink about removing Tory Lanez from their album just months ago) was hugely disappointing. I’m endlessly baffled by the instinct that drives otherwise reasonable women/femmes to stay in community with harmful men — even more-so when those femmes have been victims of abuse themselves. Chris Brown continues to be the perfect case study of how Black femmes allow themselves be a place of redemption for terrible Black men, and how that coddling helps fuel the same cycles of abuse that we are victimized by.
Simone Biles just became the most decorated U.S. Olympic gymnast in history (!!!). Period.
Speaking of the Olympics, I loved this piece about Black women Olympians talking about their hair.
Phaedra Parks is coming back to the Real Housewives, and the hypocrisy is real. I must be the only person left on earth who hasn’t yet jumped on the bring-Phaedra-back-to-Bravo bandwagon; my unforgiving virgo spirit simply won’t allow it. From Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip to The Traitors to Married to Medicine, there’s definitely a concerted effort to bring her back (and who can blame producers? she makes great TV), but i’m not into it at all. It also feels hugely contradictory to (rightly) fire everybody’s favorite villain, Kenya, over misconduct, and then turn around and bring Phaedra back after her history. But Bravo has never been the network of solid morals, so are we really surprised?
The Internet thinks J.K. Rowling’s house is infested with black mold and
it’s truethat the mold is rotting her brain and essentially turning her into the nasty bigot we all know and hate. It’s a rumor that’s come up once or twice over the years, but never with as much energy as these last couple of weeks, when her disgusting, misinformed attacks on Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, made her the Internet’s main character once again. Listen, if J.K. Rowling has no haters left, then please avenge my demise because I am surely dead and gone; but I can’t deny that adding this to her lore definitely made me laugh about a situation I’ve been unable to find humor in. (Fact check: the jury is still out on whether or not that’s actually mold on her walls or some very ugly wallpaper, but it’s way more fun to think about fungal spores attacking her brain sorry 😋)
J.K. Rowling at home, with suspected black mold on the walls in the background. The latest seasons of both Love Islands have wrapped, and for the first time in the show’s history I officially have FOMO for not being a committed watcher. Seeing gorgeous Black couples find love and genuine connections on a show that doesn’t seem, on the surface like it’s built to foster those relationships, makes me think there’s something I’m missing and now is not the time to be too cool to be part of the popular moment. So with that said, who are your favorite couples till date, and what’s the best season for me to jump in????
Ryan Reynolds said a kind of shitty thing about starring in the Green Lantern film and people are upset with him. Yes, he’s a powerful man who should know better than throwing everyone else who worked hard to make the film happen under the bus like that, but it also got me thinking. On two separate occasions in the last few weeks, I’ve been reminded of other celebrities who weren’t pleased with their past work. Robert John Burke (a.k.a Bart Bass) apparently hated being in the made-for-tv film adaptation of Stephen King’s Thinner (a terribly made film that scares me to this day and is true 90s high art, I don’t care what anyone says) and Rooney Mara got some serious backlash years ago for comments she made about the episode of Law & Order SVU that she was in as a teenager. So what do celebs and artists, particularly famous and powerful ones, do with performances they regret?
Single people are DIYing their own dating platforms and honestly, fair enough.
I just found out the reason The Proud Family was so short. A bunch of Disney shows that we loved like Lizzie McGuire, Even Stevens, Pepper Ann, Lilo & Stitch: The Series, and The Proud Family, were all given a 65-episode rule to follow. Many more interesting details in the piece, but it’s also worth it to note that “other noteworthy titles didn’t manage to approach the 65 episode range, despite feeling like they ran for much longer. Several shows, such as Phil of the Future, The Proud Family, Brandy & Mr. Whiskers, and American Dragon: Jake Long barely lasted two seasons and had a 52 episode count or lower.” Crazy!
I just read this delightful piece about The Black History of the Montgomery Brawl Folding Chair. LOL. I love us.
Culture writer David Dennis Jr. wrote an extremely insightful review that gets into why Tyler Perry is simply never going to be the filmmaker, storyteller, Privileged Black™ etc that Black people want him to be, and he truly has no incentive to be.
Watch, read, listen
I finally settled VERY LATE in to the Kim Kardashian season of American Horror Story and it’s official — Ryan Murphy has to be stopped. Kim’s performance is so bad, it makes the heavy-handed campiness of Murphy’s usual work look like high art.
To make up for that disaster, the gods sent me one of Apple TV’s greatest hidden gems, Presumed Innocent. Jake Gylenhaal and Ruth Negga are SUBLIME as the leads in this, and my love for appointment TV has officially been restored. All 8 episodes are a slow burn with twists unraveling right up until the show’s final minutes. whew.
Long story short, AHS: so bad, Presumed Innocent: so good.
Finally, here are two pieces by Substack creators I follow that I really enjoyed reading this week":
Love this