Weekly roundup of things that are 🔥🔥🔥
From the Harlem Renaissance to sleep trackers to Naked Attraction
Give Brock Colyar a Pulitzer for her profile of Real Housewives icon Bethenny Frankel: “‘They’re calling me Erin Brockovich,’ Bethenny Frankel tells me, relaxing on the back porch of her luxuriously renovated 18th-century Connecticut farmhouse and wearing a fuzzy sweater and house slippers with peace signs on them.” ☠️
I track my sleep every night with my Apple watch (or my iWatch, as I am wont to call it), and I rarely close my deep sleep ring. But maybe that’s not actually true? Experts who study sleep trackers say that there are some benefits to the data, it can also be misleading. Here’s what to know about trackers’ capabilities and limitations. 😴
Your On Clouds are about to be cheugy. You’ve been warned. ❌
I named one of my kids after Debra Winger’s character in “Terms of Endearment.” Check out this ode to its 40th anniversary: “I had never seen a movie with scenes about a lump in a woman’s armpit, or a cancer diagnosis, or a desperate, grief-stricken mother crying out for medication for her child. As wrenching as those moments were, the comedy and the tears blended in a way I had never experienced as a viewer.” 📽️
Through testing, I discovered I have one copy of the APOE e4 gene, which can double or even triple the risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. That’s why I started hormone replacement therapy one year after my last period (at age 49) and started lifting heavy weights. Learn more about how neurological changes and menopausal symptoms can be linked to dementia. 🩺
The Met is taking a fresh look at the Harlem Renaissance. While writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes were reshaping literary prose, artists like Jacob Lawrence, William H. Johnson and Meta Warrick Fuller were revolutionizing painting and sculpture, producing images of Black Americans in ways they had rarely been depicted before the 1920s. Over 160 works on loan — mostly from museums operated by historically Black schools — will soon be on display, including photographs of stylish Harlemites. 🖼️
“Best of the year” lists have started popping! Here’s one television list; I totally agree with and wholeheartedly endorse watching “The Bear,” “Reservation Dogs,” “Succession,” “Beef,” “Jury Duty,” and “Dave.” 📺
I almost fell off a hotel treadmill in Los Angeles when I heard my name by Glennon Doyle during her conversations with Roxane Gay about the reality show “Naked Attraction” on “We Can Do Hard Things.” Additional podcast fodder: “Ending Roe Was Supposed to Reduce Abortions. It Didn’t,” The Daily; “Elon Musk’s Meltdown, the Death of Twitter, and the Chaotic Future of Social Media,” Plain English; “Human Design as a Road Map to the Soul,” Pulling the Thread. 🎙️
Downloaded to my Kindle: “Wild Girls” by historian Tiya Miles shows how formative outdoor experiences helped women from all walks of life — from Harriet Tubman to Indigenous athletes — transcend prescribed social and gender roles: “Although her subjects’ worlds diverge, they all discovered opportunities and inspiration among trees and meadows, prairies and woods, the sky and the earth.” 📚
If, like me, you were always the kid in Catechism class picked to be a camel instead of Mary, Joseph or Jesus, you’ll really relate to this kid. 🥰
That Bethanny Frankel article! 👀 Dying to know who said this, “She’s a creation of Bravo. They created a Frankelstein, gave her power, and as in life imitating art, she turned against her creator. It was obvious and inevitable,” she told me.
Want to read that book too!!