Psycho cats

Hi hi hi. My life is filling up with side projects lately (reply back if you want to work with me!), so I haven't been consumed as many movies as usual. This week, you get one animated movie, one phenomenal book, and a fascinating interview with a woman who knows her shit. Saddle up!

🎥 Flow (Max)
Ninety minutes of a cat swimming and boating with other animal refugees from a flood. No dialogue. Only the vaguest sense of where and when this is taking place. This is exactly what you need right now.

📖 The First Day of Spring
Hoooo this is good. You spend your time in the head of an 8-year-old Irish girl and her adult counterpart, trading off between chapters. I'm not spoiling anything when I say she is a psychopath, because you find that out in the first sentence. But your sympathy somehow builds for this young murderer, until you're rooting for her in the end. I blew through it in 3 days.

🖥️ An interview with Rebecca Traister
Probably my favorite newsletter — the one I open every day without fail, usually the minute it arrives — is Dinner Party from New York Magazine. Its author, Choire Sicha, has such a fantastic style, and I end up learning something new 90% of the time. This week, he interviewed Rebecca Traister about a column she wrote about 'wokeness' and its factor in the election, and boyyy does it have some nuggets.

"It all goes back to the Clinton years, when they [Democrats] just started poll-testing everything. “How do people feel about this? Do they feel good about it? Then we'll run on it. Do they feel lukewarm about it? Then we're going to be quiet about it.” That totally cedes the possibility that you could shape opinion as a political party...For decades, the Democratic Party has done the opposite. The Republican Party, in contrast, has never met an unpopular issue that it doesn't want to lead with. I think about the tea party in 2010. All of the media said they just didn’t like tax policy or whatever, but in fact their goal was to defund Planned Parenthood as soon as they got to power.... If they had been going by polls, like Democrats do, they would've never uttered a word about it, but they didn't care... What they are showing their base is that they will fight like fuck for everything. They are showing commitment. They are showing passion. Whereas Dems are like, “We could be this way or we could be that way, which way do you like better?” Like the eyeglasses guy who puts in the little lenses — “Better like this, or better like this?” That's how the Democrats do leadership."

YESSSS preach it sister. The whole interview is great; check it out.

Try to keep staying sane. It's all we've got.

xoxo,
Carla