Writers Strike, Taylor Tours, I Fix Broken Links [#117]
Plus, a delightful oral history of How To Lose A Guy in Ten Days
Reading
The path to better journalism is clear. The unspeakable exploitation of Korean women kept as sex slaves for U.S. soldiers. Showrunners put the writer’s strike in context. A primer on body neutrality, which is different from body positivity. Breaking down Taylor Swift’s tour looks. I enjoyed this so much: An oral history of How To Lose A Guy in Ten Days.
Watching/Listening
Only a few more Succession episodes left! The better Succession podcast is The Watch from The Ringer.
The Diplomat on Netflix is so fun. Can’t wait to talk about it with my diplomat friends coming to visit this weekend, on break from the US Embassy in Nepal.
Tonight I’m Someone Else, by Chelsea Hodson. A collection of essays I found quite well-observed about growing up, twisted romances, and finding identity.
Werk Werk Werk
It’s GO TIME for book launching, and I hope the tour will mean we can see each other in any of the cities where there are free events. RSVP!
I have been doing things like checking all the links in the e-book edition to make sure they’re not dead, revising adapted excerpts (a lot) and giving podcast interviews about the book, some of which are dribbling out but most will drop when Flawless hits shelves May 23. Can you do me a favor and smash this pre-order button if you haven’t already, because pre-orders are so crucial in showing the number crunchers (and the algorithms) whether there’s enough interest in a book to give it more marketing juice.
Time is also running out to get a signed and personalized copy before I leave on tour, and for our Goodreads giveaway of Flawless. If you have a Goodreads login, you have only a week left to enter for a FREE hardcover copy for you or a friend.
Some Great Mentions
We made Nylon’s May must-read list, and PureWow’s list of new books for AAPI Month.
And a huge thank you to Jessica Defino, who is a one-woman beauty culture dismantling machine! She recommends Flawless as well as a slew of important reads on liberating us from a culture that overvalues surface-level appearances in her newsletter.
Okay that’s it from here! Twitter continues its nosedive so I’m there quite sporadically now. But you can find me on Instagram, TikTok, and even Facebook, even though I’m wincing even typing that.
As always, I would love to hear from you and keep sending me links, recs, and memes you think are worth sharing.
Until next time,
E
The comfort station thing is so horrible. I have two friends who are mixed race Korean adoptees in the US, they were "lucky" ???
Have you read Grace M. Cho's "Tastes Like War"? It's about her mom's life once she made it to the US.
Also I feel you about fb, there's a couple groups on there that are the only reason I go back (with a shudder).
Hey, Facebook still has some relevance! (I'm trying to sound convincing even to myself...) Plus, I can't bring myself to be on yet another social media platform besides FB and YT since they're already such time wasters for me, so at least keep a presence there for us old codgers. 😊 I should really set up at least an Instagram account at some point, if even just to keep an eye on my 15-yr old.