8/17/2023
The 33 Project (Southern France Edition)
Bonjour! We’re in the South of France for the week and it has been absolutely beautiful.
Yesterday was yacht day and it was incredible. Blue skies, salty water, and lots of sun and biafine. What a lucky life.
Let’s get into this week’s recs:
1/ A good read on Simone de Beauvoir and her feminist work.
When I read this part:
It caused, yes, a bit of public trouble. “When it was published some journalists accused her of capitalising on her mother’s suffering and her own grief; they even got a surgeon on the record saying that de Beauvoir sat at her mother’s bedside callously taking notes because she wanted to get ‘material’.”
I was a bit taken aback. The world we live in seems, mostly, entirely devoted to mining your life for capital gain. What a different time.
Also, I mean…
“… much criticised in the name of socialistic optimism. I have been told, ‘The anguish of passing time and the horror of death – that’s all well and fine, you have every right to have those feelings, that’s very honourable, but that’s your business… and don’t talk to us about it!’… If literature seeks to surpass separation at the point where it seems most unsurpassable, it must speak of anguish, solitude, and death, because those are precisely the situations that enclose us most radically in our singularity… Language reintegrates us into the human community; a hardship that finds words to express itself is no longer a radical exclusion, and becomes less intolerable. We must speak of failure, abomination, and death, not to drive our readers to despair, but on the contrary, to try to save them from despair.”
2/ An interesting thesis on cooking videos and their virality.
That’s the catch of going viral: The lowest common denominator will always prevail at the expense of innovation and individuality. Cooking is such a personal, deeply human activity. But the evolution of cooking videos represents a broader shift: Algorithms and artificial intelligence increasingly drive everyday behaviors and can stifle creativity.
But also, cool job alert! Being a food historian at the Smithsonian Institution sounds excellent.
3/ This article was a big yikes. But great reporting and a good read.
Bonus/ This one is for Lauren and any other coffee lovers.
Back to France I go…Au revoir.
Thank you as always for reading and sharing this newsletter! If you’re interested in an extra set of bonus recommendations, please consider attending upgrade u where you’ll get more content and way more love from me. See you next week.