Weekly Culture Menu 4.10.24

Nostalgia for the present.

Apr 10, 2024

For this week’s installment of the Weekly Culture Menu, we have a sampling of content across a variety of mediums, lengths, and sensibilities so that you can dip in and out all week. Once you subscribe, you can expect a weekly menu delivered to your inbox every Wednesday.

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Happy Wednesday! I’m back from a few lovely days in the Florida sunshine, with a sunburn to prove it. The accidental sun nap wins again! We extended the trip to account for the travel delays, which ultimately meant giving up my dreams of scoring last-minute Olivia Rodrigo MSG tickets at a reasonable price (I said it was a dream, okay!). Sadly, my inner teenager didn’t end up scream-singing with actual teenagers or seeing this instantly iconic moment where Olivia brought Jewel out to sing an OG breakup classic, “You Were Meant for Me.” You win some, you lose some. Let’s get into the menu!

🍤 Amuse Bouche [ -10 mins ]

🗞️ Elite College Admissions Have Turned Students Into Brands. My senior year of high school was a blur, mainly because I was so worried about getting into college that I don’t think it even occurred to me that childhood was ending. Instead, I was very concerned about ensuring that my years of competitive debate travel and various high school club commitments would pay off and send me to my dream school. I was unsurprised to learn in this article that the competitive landscape around college admissions has grown even fiercer. But, I was intrigued to learn that the college admission consulting industry has become a 2.9 billion business. Something feels broken…
🗞️ Enjoy! Enjoy! Enjoy!.
Haley Nahman
’s newsletter,
Maybe Baby
, continues to be one of my favorites on Substack. I found this week’s installment, where she talks about the ease of romanticizing the past and the difficulty of enjoying the present, particularly on the nose. As a person who feels nostalgic for a moment as it’s happening, she perfectly articulated my feelings about striving to be present. An excerpt below:

I rarely think about the sweatily missed trains, the devastating breakup, the haunt of my own inadequacy, surrounded by a level of wealth and style I’d never seen. When I do think of those things, I don’t feel them as viscerally in my gut as the buildings, the haircut, the kiss. I recall them only as the narrative texture to my heart-throbbing joy—the thorns around the rose that make it the perfect poetic subject.
I think this is how our memories work most of the time. We stamp a particular era with a particular mood, and make the details fall in line. This is why it’s so satisfying to revel in your own past. From a comfortable distance, you get to watch the pieces play their parts: the peaks, the valleys, the payoffs, and cut all the rest for time. The most vital quality of hindsight is how it’s structured, always with a beginning, middle, and end. This is nothing like the present of course (all middle), and that’s exactly its appeal. Our nostalgia is so potent we think we remember what it was like. We believe that, given a second chance, we might be able to do it better. Slow down, worry less, appreciate more.

🍟 Appetizer [ -30 mins ]

🎧 Larry David on Conan O’Brien’s podcast. I’m in the phase of my Curb series finale mourning, where I listen to every Curb and Larry David-related interview I can get my hands on in preparation for a full series rewatch. If you’re a Curb fan, the previously mentioned Origins podcast about the show's early history is a must. But if you’ve already listened to that series, I enjoyed this recent interview with Larry on Conan’s podcast. Expect me to use the line “I have one question, and then I’ve got to go” to get myself out of any future unfavorable situations.

🍽️ Main Course [ 1 Hour+ ]

Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli in *An Enemy of the People*.

🎭 An Enemy of the People. We went to see An Enemy of the People on Broadway last week, and it was as fabulous as expected. The 1882 Henrik Ibsen play, adapted by Amy Herzog and directed by Sam Gold (fun fact: they’re married), tells the story of a doctor (Jeremy Strong) who discovers his town’s water supply is contaminated and attempts to warn everyone of the potential danger but is met with pushback (to say the least). The show is playing at the Circle in the Square Theater - an intimate theater designed to mimic the amphitheaters of ancient Greece and Rome. It’s difficult to picture a bad seat, and it’s a pretty incredible experience to watch world-class performances in such close proximity. The whole cast is phenomenal (Michael Imperioli and Jeremy Strong facing off is something to behold), but Strong’s performance is especially riveting and makes a compelling case for him as one of our greatest living actors. Despite being a play from the late nineteenth century, the story feels more relevant and timely than ever. Tickets are expensive but worth it if you’re a fan of Jeremy Strong or interested in splurging on world-class theater.
🎬 How to Have Sex. This movie premiered at Cannes in 2023 and was screened at Sundance this past January. While I didn’t see it at Sundance, I was eager to watch it after hearing so much positive buzz. The movie tells the story of three teenage girls who travel to Greece for a weekend of drinking, clubbing, and hooking up after finishing their exams. They’re in that liminal moment of childhood and adulthood, desperately striving to experience all being “grown up” has to offer. One of the three girls (powerfully played by Mia McKenna-Bruce) hasn’t had sex before and feels pressure for it to happen on the holiday. What follows is an all too familiar and painful story of how many girls experience their first sexual encounters. It perfectly captures the drinking culture of young adulthood in a way that neither glamorizes nor moralizes the characters' choices but depicts a very specific experience and the mixture of joyful abandon, pain, and loneliness that can all exist in the same space. It’s a difficult watch, not the least, because its depiction of painful subject matter feels authentic to the lived experiences of myself and other female friends. It would be easy to think the film's scope is small, but that’d be missing the conversations brewing under the surface. In choosing the confined space and time of one rite-of-passage weekend, writer/director Molly Manning Walker removes hyperbole and allows you to immerse yourself in a specific experience meant to provoke conversation and reexamination. On top of that, it’s so beautifully and hauntingly shot (Manning Walker is also a cinematographer, and it shows).

🧁 Dessert [ -1 hour ]

🎧 Stephen Spielberg interviewing Denis Villeneuve about Dune Part Two. I loved this conversation between Spielberg and Villeneuve about Dune Part Two for two reasons: 1) Spielberg is geeking out on Dune in a way that reminds you that beyond being one of the greatest directors of all time, he’s also a cinephile with a love for storytelling and world-building. I expected this would be more of a technical discussion, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear how much of a fanboy he is for the franchise. 2) You can tell how much it means to Villeneuve that one of his heroes loves his film. It feels like listening/watching someone’s dream come true! I’d recommend listening to the podcast because the sound quality on the video isn’t great, but it's worth watching a few minutes just to see the joy radiating from both of these best-in-class directors.

And I’ll leave you with this TikTok that I’m pretty confident was made about me.