Rich Text

We all know it’s possible to develop to develop deep, passionate feelings about someone you only know through their voice. It’s called “listening to a podcast.” But would you agree to marry your favorite podcaster, sight unseen? This is the conceit of “Love Is Blind,” a Netflix reality show about 28 hopeful singles who step into custom-built pods (coincidence? we think not) and speak to each other...

The slippery thing about scams, cults, pyramid schemes, grifts: As horrifying as it is to be caught up in one, it can be difficult to explain what makes them any different from the general rules of life under capitalism — especially America’s religiously inflected version, in which hierarchical structures are a given, charismatic personalities are venerated, and wealth is synonymous with moral wor...

In the finale of season 1 of “And Just Like That…”, our gals are in the full swing of their third acts — mid-widowhood, mid-divorce, and of course, mid-happy marriage and motherhood. Carrie, almost a year after Big’s death, needs to decide where to put his ashes to rest, possibly with the aid of Big’s eternal spirit speaking to her through a malfunctioning reading lamp. Miranda finds out, through...

In episodes 7 to 9 of HBO’s “Sex and the City” reboot “And Just Like That…”, the mid-life crisis season, the crises continue apace. Carrie writes her grief memoir and goes on a tragic date. Charlotte discovers her 15-year-old daughter knows about thirst traps. Miranda has an affair AND a divorce without ever having an on-screen conversation with her teenage son. These three episodes offer only sli...

If there’s anything more horrifying than being a teenage girl stuck in a hormonal body and a socially treacherous high school, it’s being a teenage girl stuck in a hormonal body and the Canadian wilderness as winter approaches, food dwindles, and your fellow teenage girl companions are growing increasingly hungry and restless. That’s the topline selling point of “Yellowjackets,” a Showtime drama a...

We both have a lot in common with famous comedy multi-hyphenate Mindy Kaling. We often wonder if everyone is hanging out without us, and we adore romantic comedies. Most importantly, we graduated from college over a decade ago, and some part of us can’t help but wonder: Are young women on campus these days having more fun than we did, personally? (Or would they be, you know, Covid aside.) To be fa...

Over the last four episodes of “And Just Like That…”, our awesome threesome has really gone through it. SPOILER ALERT: We will now talk about what they’ve gone through. Proceed with caution. Carrie begins to suspect Big carried a torch for, or had an affair with, Natasha. Then she needs to get major hip surgery due to a congenital defect, and face the possibility of never walking in heels EVER AGA...

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter about cultural obsessions from your Internet BFFs Emma and Claire. If you like what you see and hear, consider  becoming a paid subscriber . Rich Text is a reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors! We soft launched Rich Text one year ago . It was supposed to be a hobby, an experiment, an attempt to rediscover joy in writing after a demoraliz...

The perennial question faced by protagonists in fiction — especially, let’s be honest, female protagonists — is whether they are “likable.” It’s both an understandable question (to convince an audience to spend any significant amount of time in their company, one would think it should be pleasant to be around them) and a limiting one (“likable” characters are not the only ones who are interesting...

A glamorous romance author tries to buy a Scottish castle from a grumpy duke. Not one, but two L.A. writers travel to the frosty East to spend Christmas with a prospective lover’s family, only to encounter a himbo who throws a spanner in the works. A foxy noblewoman joins forces with her childhood sweetheart, now a private security expert, to recover a stolen Vatican relic — and her relationship w...

And just like that, we watched “And Just Like That…”! In this subscribers-only pod, we discuss the return of sad Carrie, problematic Miranda, and boring Charlotte — and, sadly, of “she-lives-somewhere-else-now” Samantha. (This time, she isn’t going to get tired of waiting for Smith under a mountain of sushi and decide to move back to New York.) The pod is, obviously, chock-full of spoilers for the...

As 2021 winds to a miserable conclusion — a couple highlights: a new Covid variant, Supreme Court hearings over a case that could overturn Roe v. Wade, the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse — we found our thoughts turning inexorably back to a simpler time (in the sense that we were, personally, ten years old). After a long day of catching up on the latest soul-crushing news and trying to find toddler-...

Pour us a shotski of Vida and fry us an egg: we’re back in Salt Lake City, babies! When we last convened here in the frozen realm of the newest “Real Housewives” franchise, Claire was just getting the lay of the land as we discussed the first two episodes of the second season. We toured rented 7-bedroom ski chalets; we heard about who (Jen) had liked mean tweets about whose (Meredith’s) child; we...

Season 1 of “Love Life,” starring Anna Kendrick as the unlucky-in-love Darby, left both of us underwhelmed. Though it was very watchable, and undeniably spoke to our passion for love stories, it was also weirdly lugubrious for a happily-ever-after tale. The chapter structure felt a bit choppy. The British (why??) narrator overexplained Darby’s emotional journey, and lent an odd whiff of pomposity...

By the end of the Netflix series “Maid,” Alex Russell (Margaret Qualley) is an expert at having the rug pulled out from under her. (And an expert at cleaning it neatly as she’s thrown to the floor.) A single mom who left an abusive relationship with the father of her toddler, Maddy (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet), Alex dreams of going to college in Missoula, Montana and becoming a writer. Instead she’s cle...

This is the “Squid Game” recap you’ve been waiting for: the perspective of two women so squeamish they probably missed, at a conservative estimate, 15% of this ultraviolent show because they were covering the screen with their hands and whispering “no no no no no no no noooooo whyyyy.” But whatever! The violent parts aren’t important, right? The important thing is that we know what this show is ab...

We’ve been obsessed with — fixated on, really — “You” since it premiered on Lifetime in 2018. Three years and three seasons later, the thriller has taken Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), the sensitive, intellectual stalker/murderer at the center of the show, from a single bookseller in New York City to a married dad in the (fictional) tony NorCal suburb of Madre Linda. It’s been a journey littered wit...

Last week, we held a live panel discussion at SaksWorks with the always eloquent Sharleen Joynt of “Dear Shandy” about navigating the parasocial waters we swim in — specifically as podcasters and as reality TV commentators (and, in Sharleen’s case, as a one-time participant on “The Bachelor”), but also as people who live in a society that is increasingly structured by parasocial, rather than socia...

On Rich Text Book Club this week, we’re talking about “Carefree Black Girls,” a new book from culture critic Zeba Blay, who also happens to be (full disclosure) our friend and old HuffPost colleague! In 2013, Zeba tweeted a post with the hashtag #carefreeblackgirl. She was an early popularizer of the term, which reached toward a conception of Black girlhood that could be joyful, relaxed, at ease i...

The question of the bad art friend keeps reemerging, under new auspices and nomenclature — most recently, last week, thanks to a transfixing investigation by Robert Kolker in the New York Times Magazine , which plumbed the sordid depths of a long-running legal conflict between writers Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson. The site of the battle is an acclaimed work of short fiction by Larson; the grievan...

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter about cultural obsessions from your Internet BFFs Emma and Claire. If you like what you see and hear, consider  becoming a paid subscriber . Rich Text is a reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors! In Christine Pride and Jo Piazza’s new novel, We Are Not Like Them (out tomorrow at your finest book purveyors), lifelong friends Riley and Jen f...

What’s up #CircleFam? The big finale of “The Circle” season 3 — which we would describe as “50% filler, but perfectly pleasant to watch” — dropped on Wednesday, so now we’re dropping our subscriber-only recap of the last five episodes. Writer Mychal Denzel Smith joined us to unpack the events of the final third of the season, and to weigh in on the elements of a good catfish, emoji selection, and...

It’s Monday morning! My coffee is hot, but not as hot as my takes on “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.” (I invite you to picture me twirling in a silver cocktail dress as I deliver this line, winking glamorously.) I firmly believe that my life is only big enough for one extended cinematic universe, and The Bachelor franchise is happily devouring all of that space. We haven’t even done a cast bio...

Hello lovely subscribers! Welcome to another Monday recap podcast to tide us all over before BIP airs on Tuesday. Today, we’re diving into the week 2 drop of “The Circle.” And this is the week that things really start to get interesting. Alliances are forming! Twists are coming out of nowhere! Catfishes are being hunted! Sexy selfies are being sent from bed! Weirdly culturally appropriative costum...

After Emma and I watched “LuLaRich,” the new Amazon Prime series about the mostly imploded multilevel marketing company LuLaRoe and its oddball founders, DeAnne and Mark Stidham, all we wanted to do was talk about it. Ali Barthwell , the Emmy-nominated “Last Week Tonight” writer and Vulture recapper, felt the same way. So we did a podcast for our beloved angel subscribers about it! We talked about...